Vol. 47 No. 138 jul-set (2023): Saúde em Debate

The editorial for this issue of ‘Saúde em Debate’, signed by members of the Cebes team, discusses the 17th National Health Conference (CNS): [...] held from July 2 to 5, 2023, was yet another ‘act of invention of democracy’ in Brazil. The CNS continues to represent the challenges and potential of one of the oldest mottos of the Brazilian Sanitary Reform (RSB), and which permeates the creation of the Brazilian Center for Health Studies (Cebes): Health is Democracy and Democracy is Health.   The National Health Conferences emerged as a State planning instrument in 1941. Then, their composition reflected the technocratic and vertical perspective of the idea of health: a meeting formed essentially by public health specialists, mostly physicians, who would define the guidelines of the major programs of the Brazilian State for the sector, with special focus on the field of infectious and contagious diseases, to which public health was then restricted. [...] The RSB proposal presented in 1979, still in the context of the dictatorship, contributed to the 8th CNS, in which the segment of users of public health services, represented by multiple popular and union organizations, was present and constituted half of the total number of the delegation, whose proposals were systematized in a small and very powerful report with three themes: health as a right, reformulation of the national health system, and financing”.

Topics presented: Innovation strategies in medicines and vacines; Global pharmaceutical company and public institution of production and innovation in health; COVID-19 pandemic: an analysis of the early response in Colombia; Regional management in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in São Paulo; Regional and Macroregional Dependency Index in the SUS; Primary Health Care Policy: consensus and disputes in deliberative spaces of the SUS; Patient safety in Primary Health Care; violence against women reported in a Rio de Janeiro hospital in 2020; Prevalence of sexual violence against Brazilian men and factors associated with forced sex; Medical education: movements triggered by the Mais Médicos (More Doctors) Program; Residencies in health: training professionals for the SUS; infant mortality in Rio de Janeiro; Fetal malformations: the use of pesticides in Rio Grande do Sul; Prenatal care in the pandemic of COVID-19; Diabetes Mellitus in Basic Health Units in Brazilian capitals; Sérgio Arouca at the UNICAMP School of Medical Sciences; Funding for research on dengue in Brazil, 2004-2020; Efficiency in public health: a concept from engineering; The conflict mediation potential to control arboviruses vectors in Brazilian slums; Bariatric surgery in the SUS; Mental health of hospital health professionals in the COVID-19 pandemic; Decision of health professionals about their anti-COVID-19 vaccination; Brief Intervention for Psychoactive Substance use in Brazil; risk classification protocol for cancer patients in Home-based Palliative Care.