Comprehensive Health Follow-Up as a Strategy for Strengthening the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS): A Narrative Review

The Brazilian Unified Health System is grounded in the principles of universality, integrality, and equity, yet translating these principles into everyday health practices remains an ongoing challenge. Comprehensive health follow-up has emerged as a strategic approach to strengthen care coordination, continuity, and responsiveness within public health systems. This narrative review aimed to analyze how comprehensive health follow-up has been discussed in the scientific literature as a strategy for strengthening the Brazilian Unified Health System. A narrative literature review was conducted using the PubMed, SciELO, and LILACS databases. Studies published in the last five years in Portuguese, English, and Spanish were included if they addressed comprehensive care, continuity of care, equity, and health system organization, particularly in the Brazilian context. The analysis considered thematic relevance and contribution to understanding integrality, equity promotion, and structural challenges within the Brazilian Unified Health System.The findings indicate that comprehensive health follow-up contributes to operationalizing integrality by fostering longitudinal care and strengthening coordination across levels of the health network. It also plays a central role in promoting equity, particularly for socially vulnerable populations, by enabling proactive monitoring and context-sensitive interventions. However, structural and organizational barriers such as regional inequalities, underfunding, workforce constraints, and tensions related to resource allocation and judicialization continue to limit its full implementation. Comprehensive health follow-up represents a strategic pathway for consolidating the democratic and rights-based foundations of the Brazilian Unified Health System. Strengthening this approach requires sustained investment in primary health care, equity-oriented planning, and integrated governance to ensure that normative principles are translated into effective and socially responsive health practices.