Integrative and Multidisciplinary Care for People Living With Human T-Cell Lymphotropic Virus in Bahia, Brazil: 20 Years of Experience.

Brazil is home to the highest absolute number of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type-1 (HTLV-1)-infected individuals worldwide; the city of Salvador, Bahia, has the highest prevalence of HTLV-1 infection in Brazil. Due to the complex nature of several diseases associated with this retrovirus, a multidisciplinary health care approach is necessary to care for people living with HTLV-1. The Bahia School of Medicine and Public Health's Integrative Multidisciplinary HTLV Center (CHTLV) has been providing support to people living with HTLV and their families since 2002, striving to ensure physical and mental well-being by addressing biopsychosocial aspects, providing clinical care and follow-up, including to pregnant/postpartum women, as well as comprehensive laboratory diagnostics, psychological therapy, and counseling to family members. To date, CHTLV has served a total of 2,169 HTLV-infected patients. The average patient age is 49.8 (SD 15.9) years, 70.3% are female, most are considered low-income and have low levels of education. The majority (98.9%) are HTLV-1 cases, and approximately 10% have been diagnosed with tropical spastic paraparesis/HTLV-1-associated myelopathy (TSP/HAM), while 2.2% have infective dermatitis and 1.1% have adult T-cell lymphoma. In all, 178 pregnant/postpartum women [mean age: 32.7 (±6.5) years] have received care at CHTLV. Regarding vertical transmission, 53% of breastfed infants screened for HTLV tested positive in their second year of life, nearly 18 times the rate found in non-breastfed infants. This article documents 20 years of experience in implementing an integrative and multidisciplinary care center for people living with HTLV in Bahia, Brazil. Still, significant challenges remain regarding infection control, and HTLV-infected individuals continue to struggle with the obtainment of equitable and efficient healthcare.

[Access to health services: approaches, concepts, policies and analysis model]. / Acesso aos serviços de saúde: abordagens, conceitos, políticas e modelo de análise.

Access to health services is a multifaceted and multidimensional issue involving political, economic, social, organizational, technical and symbolic aspects in establishing access to universal healthcare. This theoretical review paper intends to discuss the different approaches, analyze the context and policies for special groups on access, marking an analysis model delineated by the above aspects, from readings on the topic in question. This analysis reveals a diversity of approaches to access the formulation and implementation of public policies and their potential for changing the organization of the health system. We identified progress in reducing inequalities in health and increased access to the network of the Unified Health System (SUS), especially in primary care. There were also limitations related to accessibility, fragmentation, decentralization and regionalization of the service network, with inadequacies in the process of care and attention to specific groups, and regional disparities. Finally, the analysis model proposed seeks to develop a critical stance to reflect and intervene in health practices and services, with the objective goal being responsible, comprehensive, effective, equitable and quality healthcare.

[Planning in Brazilian Public Health System: the case of the Health Secretariat of State of Bahia]. / Planejamento estadual no SUS: o caso da Secretaria da Saúde do Estado da Bahia.

The object of this article is the planning process of the Health Secretariat of State of Bahia from January 2007 to July 2009. It describes and analyses this process, discussing the difficulties and the advances to build the planning practice in this institution. It was used documental analyses and systematic registers of lived experience by the authors to do it. The process points for an approach between theory and practice articulating the Strategic-situational focus and the Communicative Action, including the principle of the Social Participation. The analyses explain that the process occurs in a pool of dialogic movements enlaced by the explicative, normative, strategic and tactic-operative moments that finished with the construction of the Health Secretariat of State of Bahia. There is a powerful planning revealed in plurality and multiplicity of approaches used to build a collective "vision of future" in organizations that adopted "plans" like instruments to qualify Government actions.

[Systematic review about the concept of access to health services: planning contributions]. / Revisão sistemática sobre o conceito de acesso nos serviços de saúde: contribuições do planejamento.

This article aims to discuss the category access to health services and the Planning contributions to building it on SUS. The central discourse axis refers to the connection between theoretic and practice planning on the Collective Health field related to different analysis dimensions of access: economic, technical-assistential, political and symbolic, described theorists in the field. The dimensions evidence contributions of subjects/authors for greatest approximation to the health reality of country; regarding the understanding of symbolic elements that determinate intervention in health-disease process, as well as regarding the different ways of organization of the Health System and policies, observed in its political, economic, technical-assistential components.