Institutional support as a fundamental aspect for joint management in primary health care: the experience of a program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This article presents reflections regarding the concepts and praxis of a new feature for health care and management, namely institutional support. It is seen as a management tool for enhancing quality of care, which has the potential to reformulate the hierarchical and authoritarian practices of health coordination and planning. Institutional support is a trigger for change that can enhance the autonomy, accountability, collective practices and new relationships between managers, professionals and users of the health system. These assumptions are aligned with the concepts of comprehensive and participatory Primary Health Care (PHC), which lead us to the conclusion that matricial and institutional support are processes that generate new models of health care and management. To appreciate the modus operandi of this feature, the Teias Escola Manguinhos/ENSP/Fiocruz experience is presented as a case study, one of the main pillars of which is the adoption of institutional support as a strategy for joint accountability and participative management of PHC in a community in the city of Rio de Janeiro.