On Thursday, March 5, at 11:00 a.m. (Brasília, UTC-3), BIREME/PAHO/WHO will hold the webinar “DeCS 40 Years – Four Decades Helping to Organize Health Knowledge,” as part of the program “BIREME 2026: New Releases and Updates.”
The activity aims to expand the dissemination of BIREME’s technical cooperation program products and information services, thereby promoting the solutions developed to strengthen health information and knowledge management in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Held monthly, always on the last Thursday of each month, the program will showcase relevant developments led by BIREME, highlighting their impact, applicability, and contributions to digital transformation and equitable access to health information.
The first webinar in the series will address the relevance of controlled vocabularies in the organization and retrieval of scientific information, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the multilingual thesaurus DeCS – Health Sciences Descriptors, and presenting the main highlights and updates of its 2026 edition.
Target audience
Professionals and institutions involved in the production, management, dissemination, and use of scientific and technical health information, including:
• Managers and technical staff from ministries of health and partner institutions;
• Coordinators and focal points of the VHL and LILACS Networks;
• Information professionals (librarians, documentalists);
• Researchers, faculty members, and students;
• Editors and editorial teams;
• Others interested in information management and innovation in health.
How to participate
• Date: March 5, 2026
• Time: 11:00 a.m. (Brasília, UTC-3 – please check the time in your country)
• Language: Spanish and Portuguese
• Registration: https://bit.ly/bireme-2026-webinar-01
Agenda
• Opening and welcome remarks
João Paulo Souza, Director of BIREME
• DeCS 40 Years – Four Decades Helping to Organize Health Knowledge
Ana Cristina Campos, Information Analyst, Health Terminologies and Classifications Unit, BIREME
• Q&A session
Context
BIREME – the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information – is a specialized center of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) whose mission is to contribute to health development in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean through the democratization of access to, publication of, and use of scientific information, knowledge, and evidence.
Within the framework of PAHO’s Strategic Plan, BIREME supports the strengthening of national and regional health sciences information systems, promotes the development of capacities and infrastructure for organizing and using information in decision-making processes, coordinates cooperative networks within the Virtual Health Library (VHL) space, and contributes to the development of multilingual scientific terminologies, such as DeCS, enhancing the visibility, quality, and impact of scientific production in the Region of the Americas.
The program “BIREME 2026: New Releases and Updates” highlights strategic developments and technical cooperation results, reinforcing BIREME’s role as a regional reference center in health information and knowledge management.
Materials and recording
After the session, the recording will be made available on BIREME’s official playlist on PAHO’s YouTube channel (PAHOTV) and indexed in the VHL Repository.
Join us, follow the program, and add it to your calendar.
Registration is free at: https://bit.ly/bireme-2026-webinar-01.