The intense pressure of civil and social movements made the 1988 Federal Constitution dedicate an entire chapter to health, stating that it should be universal and offer egalitarian access. That moment marked the creation of the Unified Health System (SUS), now in its 30th anniversary, as its creation law was not approved until 1990.

The SUS celebrates its 3 decades as one of the greatest assets of the Brazilian population, proving to be even more important in this pandemic moment. According to the 2013 National Health Survey, most of the population (80%) depended on the Unified Health System. And it can be said that 100% of Brazilians make use of the system in one way or another, be it in primary healthcare or when taking a vaccine.

The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Latin America’s most relevant health science and technology institution, includes in its institutional mission “the production, dissemination and sharing of knowledge and technologies that aim to strengthen and consolidate the Unified Health System (SUS)”. These are projects and programs that encompass the most diverse fields of public health, from direct assistance to the population to the development of drugs and technologies for the prevention and treatment of diseases.

As a foundation that supports Fiocruz, Fiotec applies its technical capacities to the logistic and financial administration of hundreds of projects so that the Foundation can dedicate to the production, dissemination and sharing of the knowledge generated in all these initiatives. In its more than two decades of existence, Fiotec has acted in projects that focus on the development of the SUS, such as in democratization of access to education by professionals of the system, thorugh the SUS Open University (UNA-SUS), which reached the milestone of 100,000 enrolled students throughout Brazil in 2014.

Care for homeless people and the elderly is the focus of other projects that rely on the managing skills of the institution. The initiatives work to ensure that these populations have access to the Unified Health System (SUS) and, simultaneously, to define the public policies that are to be followed by managers and health professionals in their activities.

The National Vaccination Program (PNI, in the Brazilian Portuguese acronym), related to the SUS, relies on Fiocruz’s annual production of thousands of vaccine doses for the prevention of various diseases. Fiotec manages, in a shared fashion, projects for the technological advancement in the production of vaccines against yellow fever, for instance, in addition to reserch focusing on the development of drugs against dengue fever and zika.

In the past few months, efforts focused on the fight against Covid-19. In 2020, Fiotec ran its first flights carrying consumables, drugs and safety equipment to be used in hospital centers and laboratories ran by Fiocruz. The institution is also responsible for the financial management of the United against Covid-19 fund, responsible for providing millions of reais in donations to initiatives against the disease all over the country, many of them directly related to the services provided by the SUS.