Estudo recente do Conselho Federal de Medicina demonstrou que menos de 10% dos municípios brasileiros oferecem esse tipo de leito pelo Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS): apenas 532 de 5570 municípios. De acordo com dados do Cadastro Nacional de Estabelecimentos de Saúde, o Brasil tem quase 45 000 leitos de UTI.

It is important at this point to clarify a few things about the emergence of this educational policy. First of all, it was not formulated apart from the community of teachers and researchers and then imposed upon them. On the contrary, great names in Brazilian Applied Linguistics, such as Luiz Paulo da Moita Lopes and Maria Antonieta Celani among others, were involved in the formulation of the Parameters. Even more important than that, a lot of teachers, individually or collectively, with or without supervision, were already trying the focus on reading as an alternative to the failure of previous practices before the Parameters were elaborated. Two well-known examples are those from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In São Paulo, The Catholic University (PUCSP) became a national center for foreign language teacher education, through the development of a Brazilian ESP project focusing on reading (CELANI, 2005)**. In Rio de Janeiro, a discussion conducted by the city educational authorities and the teachers in public schools (concerning the contents and methodology of each school discipline), during the administrations of Saturnino Braga and Marcelo Alencar, led to the proposition that the focus on reading for foreign language teaching reflected the will of most teachers who participated in the discussion.