National Communicable Disease Surveillance System: A review on Information and Organizational Structures in Developed Countries

Abstract

Introduction:To obtain necessary information for managing communicable diseases, different countries have developed national communicable diseases surveillance systems (NCDSS). Exploiting the lesson learned from the leading countries in development of surveillance systems provides the foundation for developing these systems in other countries. In this study, the information and organizational structure of NCDSS in developed countries were reviewed.Methods:The study reviewed publications found on the organizational structure, content and data flow of NCDSS in the United States of America (USA), Australia and Germany that were published in English between 2000 and 2016. The publications were identified by searching the CINAHL, Science Direct, ProQuest, PubMed, Google Scholar databases and the related databases in selected countries.Results:Thirty-four studies were investigated. All of the reviewed countries have implemented the NCDSS. In majority of countries the department of health (DoH) is responsible for managing this system. The reviewed countries have created a minimum data set for reporting communicable diseases data and information.Conclusion:For developing NCDSS, establishing coordinator centers, setting the effective policies and procedures, providing appropriate communication infrastructures for data exchange and defining a communicable diseases minimum data set are essential.

Hospitalizations and Deaths Associated with Diarrhea and Respiratory Diseases among Children Aged 0–5 Years in a Referral Hospital of Mauritania

“…Despite the decline in the burden of diarrhea and respiratory diseases since 2005, they still pose a major public health burden [ 3 ]. Both of these infectious diseases have always been in the 10 top causes of deaths among children, especially in low- and middle-income countries [ 4 ]. Globally, rotavirus and Streptococcus pneumoniae are the most common causes of severe diarrhea and respiratory infections in children, contributing to 28% and 18% of diarrhea cases and respiratory infections, respectively [ 2 , 5 ].…”

MedCloud: Cloud-Based Disease Surveillance and Information Management System

“…Upon completion of each task, data could be entered into the system. Such feedback mechanisms are lacking in many surveillance systems, resulting in lower monitoring accuracy, and importantly the intelligent system is missing self-learning [8]. The target is to help field workers take quick actions based on the recommendations.…”

Analysing the impact of the Australian health sector emergency response plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19): A proposed approach

“…Meaningful impact analysis studies are dependent on high quality data (Wassenich, 2007). Pandemic response interventions in developed nations such as Australia, that are characterised by having well developed National Communicable Disease Surveillance Systems (NCDSS) in place, have at their disposal detailed longitudinal data on pandemic trajectory and impacts (Bagherian et al, 2017). In Australia, weekly epidemiology reports on the COVID-19 pandemic are published by Communicable Diseases Intelligence (CDI), with access to detailed data sets being available subject to ethical approval (COVID-19 National Incident Room Surveillance Team, 2020).…”