Multiprofessional Care for Chronic Conditions in Brazil's SUS: Key Challenges and Opportunities for Comprehensive Health Care

This study examines the importance of multiprofessional teams in delivering comprehensive care to individuals with chronic diseases within the Brazilian public health system. Chronic conditions require continuous and coordinated actions that address biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors, which makes isolated or strictly biomedical interventions insufficient. The literature indicates that collaborative team practices enhance clinical decision-making, strengthen continuity of care, and improve health outcomes. This narrative review synthesizes evidence from national and international studies published over the past five years, selected through searches in major health databases using controlled descriptors and related terms in multiple languages. Eligible studies addressed multiprofessional work in chronic disease management and discussed challenges, collaborative practices, and impacts on care quality. The findings reveal three central themes. First, the organization and integration of multiprofessional work are essential for building shared therapeutic plans, promoting interprofessional communication, and ensuring coordinated care across different points of the health network. Second, teams face significant structural, organizational, and relational barriers, including insufficient resources, fragmented care pathways, limited information systems, power asymmetries, and communication difficulties. These challenges restrict the implementation of collaborative practices and compromise continuity of care. Third, the literature highlights substantial potentialities of multiprofessional work, such as broader clinical assessments, more humanized and contextualized interventions, prevention of complications, and reduction of avoidable hospitalizations. Multiprofessional collaboration also fosters ongoing learning and strengthens collective competencies within teams. Overall, this review demonstrates that multiprofessional work is a strategic component for improving comprehensive care for chronic diseases in Brazil. Advancing this approach requires investments in workforce development, organizational integration, information technologies, and participatory management to ensure equitable, coordinated, and person-centered care.