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The government orders of April 1996 were devoted to the second generation Regional Health Organisation Plans (SROS II) as health planning levers. One of the main issues at stake in their development was the need to favour an overall management of the regional public health priorities and to involve the system’s clients in them. In order to better understand the opinions of the clients themselves and the opinions of the health planning professionals on the participation of the clients in SROS II, a national sample was selected in order to take into account the diversity of regional experiences, the different institutional linkages and the unity of both the place and the problem at hand. Two series of 42 interviews conducted at 6 month intervals were recorded and a thematic analysis according to a validated interview grid was carried out by the Analytical Laboratory for Social and Health Policy (LAPSS) at the National School of Public Health (ENSP). This survey shows that the first attempt to include the participation of the system’s clients in the health planning efforts by the SROS II was appreciated and recognised as legitimate and useful, yet suffered from a lack of legibility and of a clear definition of its role. Other participation mechanisms remain to be investigated and explored as they could be enlarged in the next plan, in which the clients could become a separate entity of actors as an entirely independent group.