Author: Lilian Callo

With approximately 28 million professionals worldwide, Nursing is the largest occupational group in the health sector and is at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, playing a key role in patient care. In 2021, designated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the International Year of Health and Care Workers, in recognition of the performance of these professionals in the face of the pandemic, the International Nursing Council seeks to catch a glimpse of the future of nursing and how these professionals will transform the vision of health care.

As a result of an initiative of PAHO/WHO through its Latin American and Caribbean Center for Information on Health Sciences (BIREME) and PAHO’s Knowledge Management Unit (KM), both members of the EIH Department, a Basic Course on Scholarly Communication in Health Sciences was inaugurated. This Portuguese version was made possible by the partnership with CGDI/SAA of the Ministry of Health of Brazil, within the framework of a Cooperation Agreement through the Pan American Health Organization Office in Brazil.

BIREME/PAHO/WHO and the Hospital São Paulo/Associação Paulista para o Desenvolvimento da Medicina (HSP/SPDM) have maintained an institutional relationship for more than 20 years, through a service contract that aims to keep national employees at BIREME and, more recently, at PAHO Brazil. From a meeting between the leaders of both institutions, proposals emerged to revisit aspects of joint cooperation and to support the strengthening of institutional development through a technical cooperation agreement.

In 2018, the PAHO/WHO Office in Haiti, the Centre d’Information et de Formation en Administration de la Santé (CIFAS) of the Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP) in Haiti and BIREME developed a technical cooperation activity aimed at strengthening information and knowledge management to improve access, use, and production of scientific and technical health information in the country.

The Text Mining unit of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, within the framework of the Language Technology Boost Plan (TL Plan) collaborates with the Biblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la Salud (BNCS-ISCIII) and BIREME to promote the development of semantic indexing systems based on the latest advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing through an international competition called MESINESP2.

A new service is available to users of the Virtual Health Library. Since the beginning of April, it is now possible to view citation data from an indexed document in the Virtual Health Library (VHL) information sources through the Dimensions Badges service. It is possible to easily view how many citations a given publication has received, as well as to explore the citation data using the free Dimensions platform itself.

World Health Day is celebrated every year on April 7, to commemorate the founding of the World Health Organization in 1948 and to raise awareness of health-related issues. In 2021 the theme of this celebration is “Building a fairer, healthier world”. BIREME, as a specialized center in health scientific information of the Pan American Health Organization, within the scope of its mission to democratize information, knowledge and evidence for decision-making, adheres to this campaign, making the concept of equity be present in all its products and services.

On March 3, 2021 BIREME completed 54 years since its foundation. The tag cloud, specially created to mark the date, brings together key current terms that reflect the results of the team’s work over more than five decades based on innovation and the state of the art in information management, scientific evidence, and communication in health in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Twenty-three years ago, the Latin American and Caribbean Health Information Network met and approved a new health information and knowledge management model, the VHL – the Virtual Health Library, idealized by Abel Packer, former director of BIREME/PAHO/WHO. The proposed model had a common objective: to provide visibility and broad access to scientific and technical knowledge in health of and for the countries of the Latin American and Caribbean Region, contributing to narrow the gap between evidence and practice.

Originally launched during CRICS10 in 2018, e-BlueInfo is an application available for Android and iOS that puts in the hands of health professionals reliable and up-to-date information selected by experts from Ministries of Health and educational and research institutions, as well as including PAHO/WHO guidelines and scientific evidence available in the VHL information sources.