ABSTRACT
A significant and fundamental change in facility planning and management philosophies ensued with the establishment of the US Army Health Facility Planning Agency (HFPA) in 1965. The Army's health facility planning environment may best be compared with that found in a large, civilian hospital management system or health maintenance organization (HMO), one responsible for operating numerous hospitals and clinics. A multiple-health facility system permits comparative analysis of programming activities. Additionally, and most importantly, because a single planning staff manages the project from inception through post-occupancy inspection, lessons learned can be expeditiously transferred between programming efforts. While programmers and design managers on every hospital project pursued comprehensive participatory processes, all procedures have improved. Programmers who understood and exercised these underlying principles reaped significant benefits in dynamic change environments. Programming describes simply as the processes employed in formulating the program, while the program comprises the collated and translated needs and desires of the user-client population presented as a narrative and graphic exposition.
