Response
The ultimate justification for any
investment in building surveillance capacity is to improve
response to diseases that pose a public health threat. The
types of response depend on the disease and the particular
issue that needs to be addressed in that specific country.
Appropriate response can be in any or all of the following
areas:
- Policy. Infectious disease surveillance
information should inform policy decisions and facilitate
national policies that are effective at the local level
and consistent with and supportive of international disease
control objectives.
- Planning. Surveillance should
guide the development of planning priorities and the design
of disease control programs appropriate to the country
setting.
- Resource allocation. Good surveillance
information is critical to the effective allocation of
both human and financial resources in the resource scarce
environment of most developing countries.
- Health services management.
Health system information and disease surveillance are
essential to the effective management of health delivery
systems in a manner that is cost effective and accessible
to the entire population.
- Epidemiology. Good epidemiological
investigations that can inform health policy, planning
and design as well as help define local solutions to infectious
disease problems depend on sound disease surveillance.
- Outbreak Response. Surveillance
information is needed to act as an early alert system
that can trigger rapid responses to outbreaks of communicable
diseases before they get out of control.
A successful disease surveillance
system will be one that responds to the demand for information
created by the need to make better decisions. Those decisions
must be based on sound information in order to improve their
quality and the effectiveness of the actions they address.
Information should be "pulled" through the system
by a desire to use it as opposed to being "pushed"
through the system by a hope that it will be used.
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