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Legal proceedings against a unified health system, SUS, by its patients: systematic review

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 30 January 2018

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Abstract

Objective

To identify the factors that lead to the legalization and jurisdiction of health care by patients and health customers of the Unified Health System of Brazil, SUS.

Subjects and methods

The legalization of health care is effective when the citizen searches for health care in health institutions without success. Thus, his or her last alternative is to seek legal resources. This is a systematic review of the PubMed database carried out in February, March and April 2017 using the integrated method and three searches. The eligibility criteria for the studies were being published in English, Portuguese or Spanish, working with humans and articles being available in the full version. Dissertations, letters to the author, editorials, current themes and free themes were excluded.

Results

A total of 3338, 6 and 16 studies were found, respectively, in the first, second and third search. After refinement, there were 29 articles published between 2009 and 2016, of which 11 met the established criteria. The findings demonstrate that the population seeks the intervention of a legal system for access to medicine, treatment and therapy, medium and high complexity procedures and to obtain food formulas, supplies and medical hospital products.

Conclusion

The factors that contributed to legalization were predominantly related to medications and being in agreement with the other studies in the literature, with emphasis on requests for vacancies in the unit/intensive care center with new determining factors.

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Change history

  • 30 January 2018

    The journal had been advised to revise the title so that Clarivate Analytics can try to count the citations more accurately. There’s been confusion due to the existence of another journal with the same name.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luiz Carlos de Abreu.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

There is no conflict of interest. The author Rosa Maria de Souza Barbosa de Melo declares that she has no conflict of interest; author Italla Maria Pinheiro Bezerra states that she has no conflict of interest; author Jaçamar Aldenora dos Santos declares that she has no conflict of interest; author Luiz Carlos de Abreu states that he has no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This article is a systematic review that had no human experiments by any of the authors. Therefore, it did not require approval by The Ethics Committee (Resolutions National Health Council of Brazil No. 466 of 12.12.2012 and No. 510 of 07.04.2016).

Additional information

The original version of this article was revised: Due to the existence of another journal with the same name, the Publisher has added a subtitle, “From Theory to Practice.” Effective as of January 2018, the new title of this Journal is Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice.

A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-017-0893-1.

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de Souza Barbosa de Melo, R.M., Bezerra, I.M.P., dos Santos, J.A. et al. Legal proceedings against a unified health system, SUS, by its patients: systematic review. J Public Health 26, 99–108 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-017-0827-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-017-0827-y

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