Representatives of the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) met on March 16 to align and monitor actions related to Term of Cooperation 93 (TC93). The second term of adjustment (TA2) of the TC93 includes elements such as the promotion of scientific research and the dissemination of technological knowledge in health.
Until recently, it was challenging to find information about strategies, policies, and roadmaps on knowledge management, which bibliographic databases, consortiums provide access to health information as well as to learn the scientific productivity per country and territory in the Americas. This is now changing with the launch of the Profiles on Knowledge Management and Access to Health Information in the Americas, a landscape of documents, statistics, networks, and indexes related to health information in the Region.
The National Medical Sciences Information Center and the National Council of Scientific Health Societies held the VII National Workshop on Scientific Publication in Health Sciences, which aimed to discuss the implementation of models in favor of Open Science in Cuba. The event was attended by speakers from Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as PAHO and BIREME, one of its Specialized Centers.
As part of the celebration of DeCS’s 35 years, BIREME launches an innovative service for researchers, editors, and librarians in the health sciences field, the DeCS/MeSH finder. Available since February 9th, this service, which works online, automatically locates any descriptor, synonym, or qualifier of the DeCS/MeSH-controlled vocabulary of a given text in Portuguese, Spanish, English or French, in a fraction of seconds.
In order to make it easier, faster, and more objective to search for scientific evidence for decision-making in health, BIREME and the Knowledge and Evidence Translation Program, both from PAHO/WHO’s EIH Department, developed the innovative tool Evid@Easy. Using pre-designed search strategies, Evid@Easy offers ways to find scientific evidence available in the VHL according to each stage of the decision-making process.
BIREME/PAHO/WHO 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.
Expansion, strengthening, and training actions in Brazil and Latin America are on the agenda of the Reference Network – RefNet in 2021. The Network aims to promote cooperation between VHL librarians, universities, research centers, hospitals, and health organizations, through the development of search strategies that can be reused, shared, and adapted to the health context, and that have the VHL Search Strategy Repository as an information source.
Based on the Disease Elimination Initiative: A Policy for an Integrated and Sustainable Approach to Communicable Diseases in the Americas approved by PAHO/WHO at its 57th Directing Council, BIREME and the PAHO Department of Communicable Diseases and Environmental Determinants of Health (CDE/PAHO/WHO) developed educational projects for the elaboration of distance education courses with a focus on prevention, surveillance, and control of neglected diseases.
To mark World Cancer Day 2021, the Cancer Prevention and Control VHL – the result of a technical cooperation project between PAHO Brazil through BIREME and INCA – provides researchers, health professionals, and society with a series of innovative products and services that seek to disseminate relevant information and strengthen the creation of networks for information management in the area of cancer prevention and control.
BIREME, as a specialized center of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization, closed out 2020 with multiple important successes and challenges, which were continuously supported by its network of collaborating institutions and a team that works seriously, committedly, and that always transforms obstacles into opportunities. The BIREME management team made their work plans for the development and institutional strengthening of BIREME, which they shared in the early days of the new year.