Funding, flexible management needed for Brazil's health worker gaps. Interview by Claudia Jurberg.

Last month the first Cuban physicians arrived in Brazil under a new government programme to work in underserved parts of the country, both rural and urban. Francisco Eduardo de Campos tells Claudia Jurberg why the Mais Médicos (More Physicians) programme is necessary.

Undergraduate programs for health professionals in Brazil: an analysis from 1991 to 2008.

Study conducted to support the planning and implementation of public policies on human health resources. Fourteen undergraduate health courses were analyzed: biomedicine, biological sciences, physical education, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, speech and language therapy, medicine, veterinary medicine, nutrition, dentistry, psychology, social work and occupational therapy between 1991 and 2008. Data on number of students admitted, college admission rates, rates of graduating student by inhabitant, gender, geographic area and family income were collected from the Brazilian Ministry of Education database.

[Human resources and health work: challenges for a research agenda].

This article discusses several key concepts for human resources policy in health in the context of Latin America's regional integration efforts. The article focuses on different concepts of integration to emphasize the analytical distinction between regional and conceptual integration. It also presents labor and human resources concepts before discussing, in the final analysis, the challenges that a common research agenda faces in the context of current health sector reforms in Latin America.

Contemporary specificities of labour in the health care sector: introductory notes for discussion.

Background: This paper combines the literature on public health, on economics of health and on economics of technological innovation to discuss the peculiarities of labour in the health care sector. METHOD AND FRAMEWORK: The starting point is the investigation of the economic peculiarities of medical care.

Results And Discussions: This investigation leads to the identification of the prevalence of non-market forms of medical care in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).