Personal health services--as defined and organized by E. Richard Weinerman, M.D.

The rational approach to health service organization In the field of medical care, particularly that area concerned with personal health services, E. Richard Weinerman was both a prodigious worker and a provocative, farsighted conceptualist. We recall him as a man of method for approaching problems. We knew him equally well as the designer of a model for the rational dissemination of information and possible solutions. He began, always, with a premise, based upon philosophical concept. This premise he would connect to the specific task at hand. The task, then, was explored for its practical applications as well as its attendant difficulties. Now, specifics would be threaded back to the premise; but in a manner not merely philosophical, but meant for operational reality. In short, both the concept and the task received continuous exposure and testing, seasoned by time and multiple settings. Ideas and techniques then were rearranged, discarded or expanded to improved forms-and tested anew. Only those that survived this process were accepted and retained. Organization (he wrote) is the necessary base for technology; rigidity of organization is as destructive to this goal as is planlessness.... There has to be a mechanism for translating experience and research into careful planning, that relates the planning directly to the actual program, the experience of which leads back to planning. Finally, we must trust the people and respect their needs as they describe them, and produce those patterns of use that will fit human requirement. (78) The arduous forum of speeches, lectures, published papers and demonstration projects-this was Richard Weinerman's testing ground. He actively sought it: dating from 1962 there were approximately 146 papers and/or speeches, frequently at the rate of one to two a month. He sought as widely diverse audiences-often hostile ones-as he could; they ranged from medical societies, urban planning groups, local visiting nurses' associations , schools of medicine and public health, organizations for long-term care and care of the aged, numbers of group practices, hospital administrators , and HEW study commissions, to labor unions, radio audiences, and