RESEARCH
2019 – Current – “Global Health and Human Rights: Critical perspectives in the articulation of the right to health and the benefits of scientific progress in the incorporation of new drugs in the Brazilian public system”
Coordinator: Miriam Ventura da Silva
Participant: Deisy de Freitas Lima Ventura
PDJ Type - CNPq Financing Process: 150892/2019-5
Description: Access to medicines is part of the structure of the human right to health and is strongly linked to the right to benefits of scientific progress. Considering the fast pace of development of new therapies, economic globalization and the guarantee of these universal human rights, the United Nations Monitoring Committees and the World Health Organization (WHO) have formulated guidelines and addressed international conflicts seeking to clear barriers, reduce inequalities and make fair and equitable access to scientific innovations in health feasible. Brazil constitutionally guarantees the universal right to health, free of charge, equal and integral, including medicines. The judicialization of health in Brazil has shown different disputes by public and private actors, values and interests in the field of public health, especially with regard to access to medicines. The intense health litigation in the last decades, at the local and international level, has expanded the spaces of ethical, legal-political and technical-scientific problematization about universal access to new technologies, and revealed the potentialities of Human Rights Law, as sphere of social interactions, discursive model and (re)signification and (re)construction of laws, policies and sanitary and legal practices. Law 12,401 / 2011 institutionalized the evaluation process and created the National Commission for the Incorporation of Technology from SUS (Conitec), with the function of advising the Ministry of Health (MS). Conitec has become a strategic and privileged space for observing the dynamics of incorporating new medicines in Brazil. The investigation aimed to understand the dynamics of incorporating new drugs into the Unified Health System (SUS), based on the analysis of Conitec recommendations, especially the intertwining of the ethical, legal-political and technical-scientific elements used in arguments of the actors involved in the incorporation of decision-making process. From critical perspectives on global health and human rights, we will seek to observe the points of articulation and disarticulation between local and international dynamics and regulation; and also to identify neglected aspects in the underlying political structures and relationships, the concrete meanings and effects of regulation in expanding universal, fair and equitable access to new medicines. In addition to the empirical importance of the research, it is expected that the use and consolidation of critical references of global health and human rights applied to the analysis will allow us to advance in understanding the interlocutions between science and technology, rights and health, and in improving regulation for the effectiveness of the right to health and scientific progress.
2017 - Current - Judicialization, Access to Health and Justice: A Study on Therapeutic Itineraries and Health Litigation in the city of Rio de Janeiro
Coordination: Miriam Ventura Silva
Participants: Neide Emy Kurokawa e Silva, Luciana Simas Chaves de Moraes, Luiza Lena Bastos, Denise Campos Verginio, Elaneide Antonio Antunes, Érika Fernandes Tritany, Iaralyz Fernandes Farias, Priscilla de Oliveira Tavares, and Renato Maciel Dantas
Type: CNPq Universal Project n. 402079/2016-7
Description: The phenomenon of the judicialization of health expresses legitimate demands in guaranteeing and promoting rights. It involves political, social, ethical and health aspects, which go far beyond its legal component and the management of public services. In order to foster care of parties assisted by the Public Defenders of Rio de Janeiro, the Rio de Janeiro Health Dispute Resolution Chamber (CRLS) was created in 2013. This initiative has been evaluated as a successful experience by the National Council of Justice, and received the Innovare Award. The study aims to analyze how access to justice may or may not favor access to health, based on the apprehension of the therapeutic itineraries of citizens who resorted to CRLS services. It is a qualitative research, which will use the techniques of participant observation and in-depth interviews, based on a semi-structured script. The subjects of the investigation will be the claimants or their families. The approach to access to health and justice, based on the users’ itineraries, will allow the identification of different individual, social and programmatic contexts involved in their trajectory, from the identification of the health problem and the resources and information network used to the reception of their demand for legal service. In addition to the empirical importance of the proposed research, it is expected that the approximation and deepening of theoretical and methodological references from different fields of knowledge applied to the analysis of the phenomenon of the judicialization of health can be an interdisciplinary study (Law and Public Health), collaborating with new analyzes on the interlocutions between the justice and health systems, ensuring access to health care.
2017 - Current - Social Technology in Health Education: The Zika virus on the agenda
Coordination: Neide Emy Kurokawa e Silva
Participants: Miriam Ventura da Silva and Cesar Augusto Paro
Description: Based on the criticism of practices mostly centered on the traditional public health campaigner model, researchers and students from the Institute of Studies in Collective Health (IESC) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) have been developing since March 2017 the extension project “Innovating health prevention and promotion practices based on the local analysis of health vulnerabilities, in the context of the Zika virus”. Its mains objective is to develop capacities and promote innovative practices of prevention and health promotion, in the context of Zika virus, in addition to creating conditions to expand the range of mobilization strategies to address the identified problems. This research aims to understand the possibilities and limits of the proposal for social technology in health education in the Zika context that has been developed within the aforementioned extension project in basic health units in the city of Rio de Janeiro, with health professionals and community leaders. It is a qualitative research, inspired by the assumptions of action research. It aims to carry out the document analysis of the extension activity based on reports and experiences systematized by the participants. Participant observation of the activities of the extension project and in-depth interviews with some of the actors involved in these actions will also be carried out so that their perception of social technology can be learned. The study is expected to contribute to the theoretical deepening of health education practices, in tune with critical pedagogical proposals.