Author Description

Excerpt from Management Science Group Abstracts, 1971-72 This paper describes a strategic planning model designed to be used by managers of family planning systems to improve understanding, forecasting, and planning. The macro-flow model describes the patient movement through post partum and non-post partum programs. The flows model the phenomena of: outreach, continuance, post partum check ups, switching methods, referral, migration, contraceptive use experience, private protection, method effectiveness, follow up, and abortion. Strategic variables can be linked to the flow parameters to produce capacity requirements and budgetary implications. The model output includes benefit measures of total actives, couple years of protection, "Births protected," and unwanted births prevented. The fertility aspects of births prevented are modeled through a non-stationary Markov process submodel which considers demographic phenomena without burdening the basic flow structure. The input procedures used to process service statistics, outreach, clinic survey, and experimental data are are discussed. The combination of data based estimates and subjective judgment is done by "fitting" the model to past observed data. Testing is done by "tracking" model performance through conditional prediction, diagnosis, and updating. The model is programmed on a soft ware system called Express so that evolutionary model building can take place. A simple model with two contraceptive methods, two agencies, and a homogeneous target group can be structurally modified on-line to have, for example, four methods, five agencies, and two target group segments. Evolution also allows new phenomena such as abortion, advertising, or private protection to be added on-line. The concept is to build a "decision calculus" that is understandable to managers, complete, evolutionary, easy to use, easy to control, robust, and adaptive. The paper includes a discussion of how the model could be used