A year ago, a technical cooperation project began between the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Municipal Department of São Paulo in Brazil to update the municipality's Virtual Health Library (VHL).
PAHO had the support of the Latin American and Caribbean Center for Health Sciences Information (BIREME) to carry out a PHASE II strengthening strategy for the São Paulo VHL. During this first year, efforts focused on renewing and updating the library's products and services and including new sources of health information.
In the first place, the architecture of the web portal of the VHL Sao Paulo was updated and renewed. The objective was to organize the main contents of the site prioritized by the same users thanks to an investigation and analysis of the access statistics to the portal.
In December of last year, this collaboration held the São Paulo SMS VHL Meeting with the Municipal Health Care Network, in which the Sao Paulo VHL was presented. Subsequently, they held various technical meetings.
Subsequently, in April, two workshops were held on Training in VHL Information Sources, which served to develop the capacities of technicians from the São Paulo municipal health network in terms of analysis, registration, and indexing of scientific production. and technician of municipal health institutions.
The first workshop focused on the bibliographic production of books, technical notes, bulletins, reports, and information for patients; and the second workshop focused on non-bibliographic information sources such as multimedia and internet resources.
In addition, during this VHL training and development process, four experience reports were published, as well as a knowledge showcase that contains priority health issues for the municipality.
