The process of providing the conditions that offer opportunities for improving the quality of human life in a community.
Development normally covers three aspects of change.
1. It tries to raise people's living standards, including improvements in food, housing, education, employment, sanitation, environmental protection, and health services.
2. It tries to create conditions that can increase growth in self-esteem through improving or introducing social, political, and economic systems and institutions that promote human dignity and respect.
3. It tries to increase people's freedom to choose by increasing the range of available goods and services, travel, and social and political contact and by decentralizing government decision-making, to achieve greater local participation.

Because health services are large and socially significant institutions, the way in which health services develop can serve both as an illustration and a model for the style, principles, and values a country adopts for development in general.

Adapted from World Health Organization. Terminology. A glossary of technical terms on the economics and finance of health services. Internet. Accessed December 18, 2015.