Report of the Committee on Integration of Health Services

The Central Council of Health constituted the Committee on Integration of Health Services, which released its report in March 1967. The committee's chairman was Dr. N. Jungalwala, then Additional Director General of Health Services. The report states that healthcare services should be integrated and distributed on a regional basis, and that parallel services are wasteful and the result of a lack of or bad planning.The committee defined ‘integrated health services’ as services with a unified approach to medical care for the sick, instead of a segmented approach for different problems. This requires medical care and public health programmes to be under a single administrator so that they operate in a unified manner at all levels.The report states that “Health administration, like all administrations, is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”