Sistema Único de Saúde: de que sistema se trata?

Abstract

The Brazilian Health Reform is a step ahead towards an advanced health system concept. However, despite the concrete legal progress achieved through the 1988 Constitution, expressed in reforms at the broader level, aiming to organize the assistance in a hierarchyzed services network, and the promulgation of norms for the decentralized system local management, the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), as other large modern organizations, experiences a lack of coordination in its operations. This work aims to discuss the possibilities and limits of the organizational changes induced by this implementation, in the very configuration of regionalized health systems from the viewpoint of international experience with health systems reforms, taking into account the most recent contributions of the organizational theories, considering the transitional context from fordism to post-fordism. From the theoretical perspective of systems, we consider the contribution of organization theories, regarding the specificity of the field of public health, to argue the effectiveness of its regulation subsystems: control and evaluation, regulation, medical audit, health Information and also the surveillance and disease control systems, within the complex configuration of political power in this sector, in Brazil. SUS, characterized by a mix of two fordist organizational patterns the National Institute of Social Security (INAMPS) and traditional Public Health systems fails to build competent organizational structures, since it reproduces traditional models in its controlling systems. These difficulties are due in part to historical determinants, which made the legal advances towards a more comprehensive health right coincide with State reforms arisen from the crisis of fordist regulation patterns, and also with worldwide deep societal transformations, like demographic and epidemiological transitions, and the high costs of medical technology. On the other hand, the availability of post-fordist organizational solutions provides patterns for new rules and ways for health systems regulation, which lead to self-regulated behaviors on the part of health care providers, considering the goals of equity and improvement of populational health. The author conclude that necessary health care reform in Brazil requires the strengthening technobureaucracy protected against political-partisan injunctions, allowing the incubation of a professional organizational culture in all government and managerial levels, fostering the competent health work, committed with SUS s purposes.