Author: Lilian Callo

PAHO/WHO operates in the countries of the Region through technical cooperation programs and projects that formalize and operationalize the dissemination of information, the sharing of experiences, and guarantee the transparency and control of resource management and accountability among all those involved. Through Cooperation Terms (CT) with the Organization’s Country Offices, BIREME develops and improves products and services to improve the quality of production, access, and publication of information and scientific and technical health evidence for all countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean Region. Learn more about the CTs with PAHO/WHO in Brazil.

El Salvador, one of the countries that has been a member of the BIREME Advisory Committee (2018-2020), maintains close technical cooperation ties with BIREME, which made possible the development of various products and services in health information, like the country’s Virtual Health Library and the e-BlueInfo application, as well as strengthen the network of Cooperating Centers that contribute content to the LILACS database.

BIREME maintains a long-standing technical cooperation relationship with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), which has enabled the development of numerous events, products, and projects in information and knowledge management. This partnership is present in the daily operations of the institutions, in activities of technological and methodological support provided by BIREME for the collection of instances of the Virtual Health Library managed by the Foundation. In 2020, BIREME and Fiocruz agreed on a project proposal in the area of information and scientific evidence in health and open science.

The process of evaluation and selection of Brazil’s journals for the LILACS database is carried out annually, an activity in the context of TC93 with the Ministry of Health, and relies on the performance of an ad-hoc Evaluation Committee that constitutes the LILACS Committee since 2009 and that counts on eight specialists from areas that integrate the health sciences. This committee met last December 18^th, at the XXI Meeting of the LILACS Brazil Journal Evaluation and Selection Committee, to carry out the last stage of the journal selection process for the LILACS database, which started in August 2020

BIREME’s new institutional website in the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) system was inaugurated in October 2020, at the same web address. The migration of the platform to a new online content management system – Drupal – was determined by the PAHO/WHO ITS Department for a number of technical and economic reasons. The resulting interfaces in Spanish, Portuguese and English are much more secure, dynamic, and flexible, and allow one to produce visually more attractive and accessible resources, in addition to improving the search engines.

The 2^nd Term of Adjustment to the Term of Cooperation 93 (TA2/TC93) between the Ministry of Health of Brazil and PAHO aims at developing actions linked to the development and improvement of BIREME, in the context of information and knowledge management in the 2030 Agenda and Universal Health. TA2/TC93 was formalized on November 20, 2020.

The 9th Session of BIREME’s Advisory Committee (AC) of BIREME, which took place online on December 17, had the following specific objectives: (1) to hold the annual session and establish effective communication and exchange with the members of the Committee; (2) to inform members on the current status of implementation of the recommendations made at […]

BIREME, as a PAHO/WHO specialized center, part of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health (EIH), has played an important role since the beginning of the pandemic, along with the Organization’s efforts, to make available to health professionals and society with a series of products and services with reliable information about COVID-19. Learn more about these resources.

On December 18, 2020, BIREME held its traditional year-end meeting to recognize the main results achieved during the year 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and social isolation determined that the meeting should take place online, which has not diminished, however, the enthusiasm of the employees and the number of results obtained during the year, in which everyone was teleworking. EIH Director Sebastián Garcia expressed his satisfaction in attending virtually this meeting and witnessing the integration among BIREME collaborators, which he attributes as an important part of the excellent results obtained.

The VHL Network Action Plan, whose objective was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the VHL instances in the countries of LA&C and Spain, concluded its activities for 2020, after nine months of work. The results were very satisfactory, since it was possible to identify the activities that had the greatest execution by the VHL, and those that had the least execution, which will be evaluated and prioritized together with each country in the plan for 2021.