Background: The Regional Health Project (RHP) is an important lever to build a health producing system. The RHP serves as the reference for health policies in the French regions. It is developed in three main stages, preparation, diagnosis and priorities. Different institutional actors are involved: managers, administrators, leaders for democracy and medico-social services as well as primary care professionals. How have all of these actors been involved in the three main stages of preparation of the RHP?
Aim: The aim of this article is to analyze the implementation of the RHP in two French regions and how the actors in those regions perceived that implementation.
Method: The analysis of the implementation of the RHP focused on the definition of the implementation process, the diagnosis and the identification of the problems. This later one included the development of the priorities and the objectives while taking into account the resources and the evaluation. This analysis was conducted in two medium-sized regions in France between 2011 and 2015.
Results: The formulation of the problems in the RHP is rather general. Priorities and objectives are poorly justified. Resources and evaluation are not taken into account. We attribute these weaknesses to the difficulty of crossing the administrative, managerial and democratic representations with care practices in the regions.
Conclusions: A method and process that integrates the two public policy representations should be specified in a detailed document established prior to formally engaging the planning process. Therefore, the harmonization of methodology and terms is first needed as well as the development of training and research.