Surveillance Flashcards
What is epidemidemioogical surveillance?
- ongoing systematic collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data regarding a health event for use in public health action to reduce morbidity and mortality and to improve health
- ‘understanding an ongoing story - and how to influence it’
- ‘monitoring trends is the cornerstone objective of most surveillance systems’
what areas can be surveyed?
- infectious diseases
- chronic diseases
- injury
- health service uptake
- vector distribution
- environmental hazards
what are the elements of surveillance?
- data collection (on a health event)
- analysis
- interpretation
- dissemination
- action
what is surveillance used for?
- characterising patters of disease
- detecting epidemics
- further investigation
- research
- disease control programmes
- setting priorities
- evaluation
what are the two types of surveillance?
Indicator based:
specific selected ‘indicators’ under surveillance
- generally specific infectious diseases or cancers
- most commonly passive notification by clinician/laboratory
- report on rates of disease by demographic characteristics of affected individuals (time, person, place)
Event-based
organised monitoring of reports, media stores, rumours, and other information about health evens that could be a serious risk to public health
what are the types of surveillance that come under indicator-based?
- Passive surveillance
- Active surveillance
- Sentinel surveillance
describe the elements of passive surveillance
Routine reporting of health data:
- notifiable diseases (list that clinicians are legally required to notify when they see them)
- disease registries
- hospital data
Useful source of health information:
- baseline data
- monitor trends
- monitor impact
- low cost
- data linkage
- wide area
Limitation:
- under-reporting (if you don’t go to the dr because you live rurally or something)
describe the elements of active surveillance
serosruveillance: the monitoring of the presence or absence of specific substances in the blood serum of a population
health survey: go out into the community and diagnose ?? active case finding.
describe the elements of sentinel surveillance
Where you collect health data at specific institutions or groups to monitor diseases or trends, and detect outbreaks
- if its voluntary (have to volunteer to be a part of it) it will be bias
describe event-based surveillance in more detail
Organised monitoring of reports, media, stories, rumours, and other information about health events that could be a serious risk to public health.
- rumour surveillance
(media, discussion sites/blogs, social media, medical reports)
- keeps an eye on loose repots and puts all the pieces together
desire the data collection step of a good surveillance system
- clear case definition (strong predictive value)
- organised
- workable/practical/simple
- uniform
- continuous
- timely
- sensitive
- acceptable (to the public and key stakeholders)
describe the analysis step of a surveillance system
- number of cases
- descriptive epidemiology in more detail
- person (age, sex, ethnicity etc.)
- place (within NZ, comparison to other countries)
- time (change over time)
- rates (when possible)
describe the interpretation step of a surveillance system
- what’s going on?
describe the dissemination step of a surveillance system
- to those who need to know (ministry of health, district health boards/public health units, the affected population/key stakeholder groups)
- periodic reports
- newsletter
- special alerts/media
- annual report
- presentations
