By the mid-1980s, following the declaration of amnesty, a number of these doctors
began to enter the national offices of the Ministry of Public Health and developed a forum
for discussion. As one of the network’s founders, the late Dr Sanguan Nittayarumphong
(2006, 48) has written: “The Sampran Forum was originally conceived as a platform to
discuss [the issue of a Basic Minimum Needs approach to health] with the intent to
establish agreed upon protocols for measuring BMN.”