Abstract

MARTINEZ ALVAREZ, Eddier Alexander. SIVIGILA, an infrastructure mobilizing diseases, policies and practices in public health surveillance. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2016, vol.39, n.2, pp.283-302. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v39n2.58977.

Technologies are critical in large organizations, but they have a paradoxical nature that in turn facilitate and hinder organizational change. Rather than occupying a space and place in a specific time frame, an infrastructure appears when a set of local practices are produced by a larger scale technology and can then be used as a naturalized form by its users (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). This article describes how the Colombian Public Health Surveillance System (SIVIGILA) constitutes the infrastructure to develop Public Health Surveillance (PHS). For this, I conducted a case study with a multi-sited ethnographic perspective (Cresswell, Worth and Sheikh, 2011; Marcus, 2001). From Susan Leigh Star's model, I identified in SIVIGILA the eight dimensions of infrastructure proposed by Star (Bowker and Star, 2000; Star, 1999; Star and Ruhleder, 1996). It can be concluded that infrastructures can only become visible when they are in operation and with the participation of all its actors, thus solving the tension between the local and the global (Star and Ruhleder, 1996).

Keywords : Infrastructure; actor-network theory; public health surveillance; public health policy; SIVIGILA; multi-sited ethnography.

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