Rogério Pinto on Brazil’s Approach to Integrating Public Health into Primary Care
The recent riots in Brazil drew attention to the inadequate provision of social services in that country. It is a landscape Associate Professor Rogério Mieles Pinto knows well. Not only was he born in Brazil, but he continues to do research on its Family Health Strategy (officially known as Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS).
According to Professor Pinto’s findings, one thing Brazil’s publicly funded health care system gets right is its tendency to foster close relationships between community health workers and the doctors and nurses and other health professionals who staff government-funded clinics. Such “transdisciplinary collaborations” are the key to integrating public health and primary care services over the longer term, he argues, and to putting the focus on evidence-based practice.
Professor Pinto recently wrote up these findings in an article for the American Journal of Public Health (November 2012 issue, Vol. 102, No. 11, pp. e69-e76).* In this video abstract made expressly for the journal in in collaboration with CUSSW’s Office of Communications, he summarizes the main points of his paper and also reports on the interest it has generated in the scholarly community (AJPH subsequently published a letter it received about the article, along with Professor Pinto’s response to the letter).
* Professor Pinto’s co-authors:
- Melanie Wall, Ph.D., Mailman School of Public Health & New York State Psychiatric Institute
- Gary Yu, doctoral candidate, Mailman School of Public Health
- Cláudia Penido, M.D., Estratégia Saúde da Família/Saúde Mental, Carreira Comprida, Santa Luzia, Brazil
- Clecy Schmidt, M.D., Estratégia Saúde da Família, Varginha, Silva Jardim, Brazil
