The Health and Social Services group’s main aims are to facilitate the exchange of information about current work on health and social services topics amongst practitioners and to disseminate information about OR studies to doctors, nurses, administrators and other health service workers.

The group also serves as a forum for the discussion of matters of interest to OR scientists and their clients in the health and social services.

In pursuit of these objectives the group arranges conferences, meetings and workshops with a majority of their efforts concentrated on four one-day conferences per year: past endeavours include a series of meetings on various health-service OR applications and a workshop that led to the special interest group’s submission to the Royal Commission on the NHS).

The SIG publishes an occasional register of current OR projects in health and social services and maintains a mailing list of people and organisations interested in the application of OR in health and social services. In addition, the Health and Social Services SIG supports, where appropriate, liaison with other bodies such as the EURO Working Group on Health Services and the Medical Specialists’ Group of the British Computer Society.

Committee details