Dr. Jacobo Finkelman, interim Director of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health (EIH) visited BIREME on April 24 to 26. The objective of this visit was to align the Center’s work and technical cooperation to the activities held in Latin America and the Caribbean by the Department, in which BIREME is integrated.
Alexandre Pozza Urnau Silva, Sub Secretary of Administrative Issues of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the General Coordination of Documentation and Information (Coordenação Geral de Documentação e Informação, CGDI team met at BIREME to discuss topics on the management, institutionality and technical cooperation of the Center. Besides Dr. Diego González Machín, Director, and the BIREME team, Jacobo Finkelman, Interim Director of the PAHO/WHO EIH Department, and Janine Coutinho, Knowledge Management Consultant for PAHO/WHO Brazil, also attended the meeting.
BIREME, as a PAHO/WHO Specialized Center on health sciences information, is constantly searching for innovative ways to display information and evidence on specific topics for its users, in order to support research, teaching, clinical practice and decision making. Windows of Knowledge are VHL resources that aim to give visibility and access to the main documents and other information resources on priority health topics.
The inclusion of the scientific output of the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada – IPEA) to the LILACS database was ensured through a project using interoperability between the system that stores IPEA data and the system adopted by the LILACS Methodology of BIREME. Motivated by the success of the project, IPEA organized a seminar in March 2019 about the relevance of the use of scientific and technical evidence in health decision making.
The Global Summit Telemedicine & Digital Health, coordinated by the Associação Paulista de Medicina, which took place recently in São Paulo, was a place for discussion and exchange of knowledge, experiences, new concepts and ideas related to innovation, technology and enterprise in health. BIREME was represented in the event by its Director, Diego González and by Verónica Abdala, Services and Information Sources Manager.
March is celebration month for BIREME: 52 years of the Center on the 3rd, and on the 27th, 21 years of the Virtual Health Library (VHL), the main technical cooperation strategy. These are important dates and celebrations, as they strengthen the institutionality of the Center, which acts regionally with all Latin America and the Caribbean countries.
The first meeting between BIREME Director, Dr. Diego González, and the Deputy Executive Secretary of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, Dr. Erno Harzheim, took place in Brasilia on March 20, with the purpose of discussing the country’s technical cooperation with the PAHO/WHO Specialized Regional Center. Alongside Dr. González, Dr. Socorro Gross, PAHO/WHO Representative in Brazil, and Janine Coutinho, PAHO/WHO Brazil Knowledge Management consultant were also present.
BIREME organizes and delivers a workshop on access and use of scientific evidence for supporting decisions and interventions related to collective health problems in the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, an initiative of the Ministry of Public Health of the Dominican Republic, with the support of the PAHO/WHO Representation in the country.
BIREME and PAHO/WHO Venezuela have increased efforts for the reactivation of the Virtual Health Library (VHL) and the visibility for scientific output on health information produced in the country through the strengthening of the network of Cooperating Centers and the participation of the Asociación de Editores de Revistas Biomédicas.
Once again, students from Paraguay, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Brazil visited BIREME to participate at courses on Scholarly Communication and Access to Information, within the framework of the partnership established by the PAHO/WHO Specialized Center with the Latin American Federation of Scientific Societies of Medical Students (FELSOCEM).