Training of personnel for health services operations research in Latin America.

There appears to be no single universally accepted definition of health services research. However, in 1976 the XVIII Meeting of the WHO Advisory Committee on Medical Research accepted the definition of health services research as “the systematic investigation and evaluation of a country’s health services in terms of both their interrelationship with all health related factors and such measures as feasibility, needs, coverage, effectiveness, utilization, costs, and efficiency.” Health services research is multidisciplinary in nature; ideally, it should improve the decision-making process and lead to the optimatization of the use of resources (I). Health services operations research (HSOR) is the application of scientific methods, techniques, and tools to problems involving the operation of health systems so as to provide the administrators responsible for those systems with the optimal or at least adequate solutions to their problems. As used by PAHO, the term encompasses the quantitative and analyticaE approach to health services research.