Matrix Support and Approximations That Cross Territories: a Narrative Review

Abstract

Matrix support has become a strategy to improve healthcare delivery within Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS), especially in the field of mental health, by articulating teams, increasing resoluteness, and promoting collaborative practices. Given its growing dissemination and the diversity of experiences described in the literature, this study aimed to analyze the historical development of matrix support, its main challenges and potentialities, and its relations with analogous international experiences of shared care. This narrative review was conducted in the SciELO, LILACS, and PubMed databases and included 16 qualitative studies published between 2019 and 2025 that directly examine matrix support or related models. Results were organized into three axes: the history of matrix support, challenges and potentialities, and analogous international experiences. The findings indicate that matrix support emerged in connection with Brazil’s Sanitary and Psychiatric Reforms, grounded in interdisciplinarity, co-management, and expanded clinical practice. The studies highlight challenges such as the persistence of the biomedical model, weaknesses in network articulation, and insufficient professional training, while also identifying potentialities such as increased resoluteness in primary care, strengthened shared responsibility, and expansion of continuing education. Although analogous international experiences present similarities in collaborative practices, they do not reproduce the conceptual and political depth of the Brazilian model. It is concluded that matrix support is a unique social technology with significant impact on the reorganization of healthcare practices, whose effectiveness depends on ongoing processes of integration and interprofessional training.