Continuing education for workers in the Unified National Health System (SUS) is a key strategy for mitigating the problems they face in their daily work and thereby providing the population with better and more humane care. The Open University System of the Unified National Health System (UNA-SUS) exists for this sole purpose: quality education for those caring for the Brazilian population’s health.

The system has three components: the Collaborative Network of Institutions of Higher Learning, currently including 36 institutions; the Collection of Educational Resources in Health (ARES), which stores and distributes educational resources produced by the network, as offered in its courses; and the Arouca Platform, where professionals can consult the teaching institutions’ course offerings.

Based on this format, in 2014 the system reached the important milestone of 100 thousand health workers enrolled all across Brazil, making UNA-SUS larger than many medium-sized Brazilian universities.