Scenarios are a way of using our understanding of the present to form views of possible futures.
We take current issues and trends, relevant to the future of the NHS, and using a bit of imagination, build up pictures of the future. Often the inter-relations involved are complex, and not very well understood. Looking at scenarios do not lend themselves to deciding on hard outcomes rather at raising the questions that will need to be answered. They are often be chosen to represent contrasting possibilities, and will sometimes stretch credulity. A rational approach to building a scenario is required, but there is no one way of doing this.