The tool is used throughout all Reference Centers for Social Assistance in the Pernambuco state capital to gather information about over two thousand families
Brasilia, July 1 2015 – Brazil’s social assistance service has been using the Unified Social Assistance System (Suas) Chart since 2012 – click here to visit the cover page and content of the document, respectively. The Chart is an important tool used at the national level to guide the process of collecting information about individuals monitored by the Service of Protection and Integral Support to the Family (Paif) and the Service of Protection and Specialized Support to Families and Individuals (Paefi).
With the Chart, the teams working at Specialized Reference Centers for Social Assistance (Creas) and Reference Centers for Social Assistance (Cras) all over Brazil can store information about the stages of social work done with the families and record data about vulnerabilities and personal and social risks, highlighting how important the social assistance policy is to Suas users.
When it introduced the Chart in 2013, Recife became one of the first Brazilian cities to implement a social service tool to systematize family data and information. Nowadays, the document is used by the four Creas and nine Cras in the Pernambuco state capital in their support of the two thousand families included in Cras and the 60 families in Creas.
“Data standardization has improved the quality of the activities – it has made skills more visible to municipal managers and enhanced investments in services due to more precise data entry,” states Andrezza Sandrelly, Head of the Cras Division in Recife. “The Chart makes things easier for families and technical staff, as staff members have full access to families’ case histories. It is a way of keeping records about family assistance with no risk of data loss”, he adds.
Click here to read the interview with Andrezza Sandrelly
Prior to instituting the use of the Suas Chart, the city used its own registry – the Family Information Form (FIF) – developed by the Cras and social assistance surveillance teams in Recife. “The previous form was more restrictive, as the data was used to determine families’ socioeconomic status – it was up to the staff member to decide whether additional information should be collected,” says Jaime Lima, a Cras psychologist and Suas Chart trainer-of-trainers. “The Chart was a breakthrough, as it includes information about intra-family relationships, for example, and allows us to capture other nuances.”
According to the General Coordinator of Social Assistance Surveillance at the National Secretariat for Social Assistance of the Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger, Luis Otávio Farias, the Suas Chart was developed by the Brazilian government in response to the municipalities’ inability to create their own structured tools. “Although the use of this model is not mandatory, we insist on recommending it because we know that many municipalities do not use the Chart,” he says. “We need to convince these professionals about the usefulness of this tool – feedback has been very positive so far,” said Farias.