In virtually every industrialized nation, the human services constitute the largest economic sector. Exploding costs of these services have driven many national budgets to unimaginable deficits. At the same time, there is an ever-increasing demand for health, education, corrections and other social services. Despite the proportions of this industry, there is little or no theoretical foundation for design and management of service delivery systems. Nor is there a sound conceptual basis on which public policy can be raised. This paper grows out of the increasing similarity among human services in the industrialized countries. All such services are driven by population growth and the dynamics of problem "incidence" and "prevalence". They are designed to deal with particular "case mixes" of clients through "arrays of service". The terms in quotations in the previous sentences provide examples of the language the authors use to formulate a general theoretical model of human service systems. The model design is implemented in ITHINK and is identified to human services systems in the United States. Model behavior is analyzed to illustrate general principles of delivery system design policy objectives interact over time. In this way, the model points to important insights which policy markers and human service administrators might consider in their search for solutions to social problems. Although the model in this paper is based on the peculiarities of human services in the United States, the authors make a case for wider applicability. Using health care and education examples from other countries the authors show how major propositions in the general theory are viable in widely differing context. The result is a powerful schema which can guide research, policy making and human service administration.

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Date created

• 1995

Type

• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

12420ec6bd5f758d2b4dea59aabd75a9

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Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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Part of

b83f2ce2912343b559f967dd985da515

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives