Articulation of Health Surveillance and Primary Health Care in Brazil: Perspectives in the Unified Health System (SUS)

The Health Surveillance (HS) aims permanent analyses of the health status linked to a set of actions intended to control determinants, risks and health hazards. The HS is based on health promotion, surveillance, protection, prevention and control of diseases and health problems and it consist of: Epidemiologic, Health Situation, Environmental Health, Occupational Health and Health Care Surveillances.  The discussion of articulation of HS with the Primary Health Care (PHC) has not been easy because this integration should occur in spaces of knowledge from epidemiology, planning and social sciences. When conceived as logic of organization, the articulation refers to model changes of attention inserting the PHC in the health accountability. It passes to be an ideal space for the development of actions with the same socio-cultural characteristics and population dynamics from Family Health Team (FHT). From the tools of HS, the teams develop programming skills and planning in order to organize actions to ensure access in different activities, thus gradually impacting on the main health indicators changing the quality of life. Proposals have been made and some have already been published in the Journal of PHC, published by Ministry of Health, especially those related to communicable diseases but this linkage is still a challenge. Integration has purposes of comprehensive care, improvement in health policies, better health care systems, and greater social participation. The guidelines have already drawn integrate working processes, evaluation sets and permanent health education. The challenges are the definition of responsibilities and consolidation of networks. Finally we believe that proposals to facilitate professional guiding can be applied. However, this process must occur according to the needs of each situation as the work need not be standardized throughout the country, giving each team the chance to design your need according to the linkage between surveillance and those with PHC.