Profile of municipal managers of healthcare in Brazil: an overview of three decades

Abstract

Municipal health secretaries are strategic actors in the construction of the Brazilian national health system - SUS, actively participating in the system’s governance. The comparative analysis of the profile of municipal secretaries over three decades (1996, 2006, and 2017) was carried out using the database of three cross-sectional surveys carried out at the national level with structured questionnaires aimed at all municipal health secretaries in the country. The increase in female participation, greater diversity in ethnic and racial terms, greater professional qualification of managers, and the renewal of the generational profile, reiterates the advance of the democratization of these management spaces. Despite the renewal of the profile during SUS’s construction, the challenge remains to make the public machine more representative of Brazilian society as a whole.