While health has always been seen as an integral aspect of development planning the significance attached to it has varied according to the debates about development in the wider sense. Currently there is a tension between those who treat health provisions as the welfare arm of structural adjustment policy, those who treat it as a form of human resource investment and hence critical to the process of economic recovery and those who see it as an end in itself, an essential component of human welfare. This paper while addressing different aspects of the issue of health, share the position that health policy must be to establish the most effective means by which health care can be effected within the community. It has been increasingly recognized that human labour is one of the key scarce resources for many economies. With such a perspective, the absence of disease is only one criterion for judging the effectiveness of health policy. Other criteria are reliability, responsiveness as well as the more intangible quality of respect accorded to those who use health services so that the ‘clients, become ‘partners, in shaping how health needs are to be addressed.