The Health Surveillance Center of the State of Rio de Janeiro intends, with the decentralization of low complexity health surveillance actions for Cities, to meet the minimum requirements to strengthen the state health surveillance system, creating a support structure for the descentraliztion process. The objective of this paper is to present the situational diagnosis of the health surveillance agencies that have adopted the System Full Management. The methodology encompasses the analysis of 22 municipal health surveillance agencies that use the System Full Management, according to the Unified Health System's Basic Operational Norm dated 01/96, in the period from July to December 2002, by means of a standard questionnaire applied by the Health Surveillance Center of the State of Rio de Janeiro, including comments of participants, in which the multiprofessional team interacted with the local services technical team during a technical visit. In addition to collecting data, the team tried to provide guidance as to information techniques and administrative organization. Based on the results, we conclued that most municipal health surveillance agencies with System Full Management have serious technical-operational difficulties in the development of decentralized actions, showing the need to make municipal managers aware of the importance of these actions and to guide them in effectively structuring local health surveillance, in a partnership with the Health surveillance Center of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
Decentralization; Health surveillance state system; Local health surveillance