The Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME/PAHO/WHO) develops and improves products and services that seek to improve the quality of production, access, and publication of information and scientific and technical evidence in health for all countries in the Latin America and Caribbean Region.
In particular, it works in coordination with the PAHO/WHO Country Offices and counterparts, developing projects to achieve health outcomes at the organizational, national, and international levels, through Cooperation Terms (TCs) or specific Agreements. With the Brazilian government, its main counterpart is the Ministry of Health (MS), made possible through the PAHO/WHO Office in Brazil.
Its Work Plans (BWP/PTB) are biannual and are aligned with the Strategic Plan of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) 2020-2025 and the Sustainable Health Agenda for the Americas 2018-2030: a call to action for health and well-being in the region. PTBs involve the programming and development of Products and Services (P/S); estimating the budget for execution; availability of financial and personnel resources under different contract categories.
In this sense, BIREME has maintained a close institutional relationship with Hospital São Paulo/ Associação Paulista para Desenvolvimento da Medicina (São Paulo Association for the Development of Medicine) (HSP/SPDM) for over 20 years. The existing service contract between the parties aims to maintain national personnel assigned to both BIREME/PAHO/WHO and PAHO/Brazil in Brasilia, thus constituting an important workforce in the field of health information science for Brazil and for the Latin America and Caribbean Region.
Thus, it is extremely important to maintain the institutional relationship between HSP/SPDM and BIREME/PAHO/WHO in order to meet the health information priorities in Brazil and the Region, also cooperating with the formation and development of intellectual capital in administrative and technical areas, which have an impact on the institutional strengthening of both BIREME and HSP/SPDM.
“In 2021, the BIREME Management and the HSP/SPDM Superintendence will be in close communication and exchange to define new avenues of action in the fields of scientific and institutional communication, training, product and service development, for example, that can cooperate with the continuous institutional strengthening of both institutions,” said Diego Gonzalez Machín, Director of BIREME.
BIREME and the Ministry of Health of Brazil – a little more
BIREME’s cooperation in the development and implementation of PAHO Brazil’s TCs with the Ministry of Health strengthens the Center’s technical cooperation in meeting health information priorities in Brazil and in the Region, in favor of equitable access to technical and scientific health information.
The MS is a permanent member of BIREME’s Governance Committees, Advisory Committee (CA) and Scientific Committee (CC), which provide recommendations for improving and strengthening BIREME’s regional technical cooperation results, including those related to national priorities.