In its report on “The Third Ten Years of the WHO,” WHO has highlighted the usefulness of OR in improvement of health-care delivery in terms of its efficiency, effectiveness, and wider coverage by testing alternative approaches even in countries with limited national resources. Described as “the science of better,” it helps in identifying the alternative service delivery strategy which not only overcomes the problems that limit the program quality, efficiency, and effectiveness but also yields the best outcome. The kind of research that Alma Ata Declaration recommended for improvement of health-care delivery is essentially OR. A number of issues were yet to be resolved and researched before primary health care was operationalized under local conditions. In 1978, Alma Ata Declaration acknowledged that primary health care was well known globally but, at the same time, also noted that modalities of its implementation were likely be different in different countries depending on their socioeconomic conditions, availability of resources, development of technology, and motivation of the community. It emphasized the need of identifying health-related issues needing research and thereby generation, dissemination, and utilization of the newly acquired knowledge for health promotion. The world soon realised the potential of this kind of research and many disciplines especially management sciences, started applying its principles to achieve better returns on their investments.įollowing World War II in 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) came into existence with research as one of its core functions.
Origin of the term operational research (OR), also known as operations research, can be traced back to World War II when a number of researches carried out during military operations helped British Forces produce better results with lesser expenditure of ammunition.