Public Health Surveillance

by: admin Healthcare Research‚ Quality of Care‚ Social Change Comment off

      Disease surveillance is the ongoing systematic collection, merging and analysis of data and the dissemination of this information to those who need it so that action may be taken. Surveillance like this requires understanding of how public data are accumulated and used for surveillance purposes. For example, some public disease data can be released easily to others with few or no restrictions. These include public-used data sets and some regulatory or administrative data. Public-used data sets can be shared with everyone because they will not contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and have had information removed that would allow identification of any persons.  It can be seen as the scope that guides disease control activities and measures the impact of the system. This article further emphasized and supported the role of surveillance in public health. Surveillance is especially important to monitor progress for programs that aim at specific goals. For example, programs pertaining to polio eradication, measles control or elimination, and maternal and neonatal tetanus elimination could use health surveillance systems to track progress of the diseases. The AFP surveillance systems that were set up in many countries can be used as immunization-related surveillance for other diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) is a great advocate of public health surveillance issues. WHO provides recommended standards for surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases, and makes data available in consolidated format. The presentation of surveillance systems can be measured by using a series of attributable values, such as sensitivity, timeliness, representativeness, positive predictive value, acceptability, suppleness, straightforwardness, and costs. As a lesson learned, public health informatics was a relatively new field; the corresponding capabilities should include the knowledge, skills, and abilities to organize information for public health purposes, leveraging technology within the public health settings. The practice of health informatics must also incorporate knowledge from other fields that contribute to public health (e.g., epidemiology, microbiology, toxicology, statistics, etc.).