The King's Fund organised this conference because of its interest in and concern about the relationships between "epidemiology" and developments in service planning in the NHS. The number of applications to attend the conference indicated this interest was widely shared. To many, epidemiology and service planning appear to proceed in very different ways; plans produced by Health Authorities tend to take little account of epidemiological studies and insight. the idea behind the conference was to look at whether the gap between the two subjects could be closed. The conference programme dealt with the application of epidemiology to service planning.