Health Information Policy: the role of Cict / FIOCRUZ

More than one century ago, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz – FIOCRUZ was founded as a research institute to fight against infectious diseases in Brazil. Alongside the years, FIOCRUZ has gained recognition around the world by its competence in delivering knowledge, information, health products, and trained human resources mainly to meet the Health Brazilian System.demands. It was also under the leadership of Oswaldo Cruz that FIOCRUZ has set forth a close relationship between research activities and information issues – an academic library was created almost immediately after the Institute establishment and it was published its first scientific journal - Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. These events have shaped important features of the organisational emerging culture: researchers and librarians working in close collaboration in the search of maximising the access, generation, and dissemination of health and biomedical scientific and technolog ical information. FIOCRUZ has also anticipated the evolution of information as a document to information as an event – around the 80s an innovative information unit was created which nowadays became the Centro de Informação Científica e Tecnológica – CICT. Crucial for FIOCRUZ fine tuning in this new health research configuration, which emphasises the crucial role played by information and knowledge, has been the ability to work in collaboration with experts outside its boundaries. BIREME has played a significant role in this achievement. Nowadays, information has not been seen only as an input to health research, it has become a suitable product or process of health research. This paper recounts this evolution that has culminated, amongst other achievements, in a  leading position in health virtual library development, and in the establishment of the National Health Information Policy, essential to strength the area.