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Declaration of Rio

Information and Knowledge for Health Innovation


We, participating in the CRICS 8, from September 16 to 19 in Rio of Janeiro, 

• Conscious that innovation in health is a cultural, political, and social process of change in the forms in which society organizes its answers to health challenges;
• Considering that these processes of change should combat the avoidable and unjust inequalities in the health situation and in the access to health care between diverse social groups;
• Taking into consideration the need to strengthen the relationships between the production of knowledge and its utilization in the definition of health innovation policies;
  
• Recognizing that the equitable access to information and knowledge is an essential element to strengthen the democratization of the decision making processes of innovation in health,

We urge the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to adopt explicit policies, human resources training and forms of organization and management of health information and knowledge that promote equitable access to these public goods, such as the open access model of Virtual Health Library, to:

• Promote the sovereign insertion of the countries of the region in the global flow of scientific information, taking advantage of the opportunities created by globalization and the political-institutional advances in Latin America and the Caribbean;
  
• Advance the processes of sanitary reform with emphasis on primary health care, assuring the compliance with principles of equity, universality and integrality of care;
  
• Adopt intersectorial policies of health promotion based on evidence and in the action on the social determinants of health;
  
• Create technological innovation systems that assure the development, incorporation and equitable access to new products and processes aimed to improve the quality of health care;
• Regulate the incorporation of new health developments in order to assure safety and equitable access to them
• Allow that the diverse sectors of society became actors in the innovation process, orienting it in favor of their health and wellbeing.