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Health Surveillance Systems

36300 Medical Practice Kylie Pfeifer
Health surveillance systems are used to monitor the health of the public. These systems use the collection of data from public health systems and analyze it for the purpose of understanding health risks and providing information to the public if there are risks. This system is also incorporated to assist with public health responses by noticing certain issues such as epidemics. The detection of outbreaks is an essential part of the West African health surveillance system due to the amount of infectious diseases such as Ebola (Woolhouse, Rambaut, & Kellam, 2018). 

Prior to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, the public health surveillance systems were not established very well and the results of clinical surveillance were unreliable due to misreporting, under-reporting, and delayed detection of diseases. This was shown to be an issue during the  Ebola outbreak. The result of the knowledge of how limited the surveillance systems were in West Africa led countries to improve upon them so that further epidemics could be recognized and controlled earlier. 

The improvements in these countries have been to surveillance for Ebola as well as other infectious diseases that have the potential to become an epidemic if not monitored. This is happening in Liberia with event-based surveillance that “is implemented as part of a broad system for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR), which documents 14 priority diseases and conditions” (Marston et al., 2017). This system tracks events that happen in communities and reports them to the closest health facility, which is then communicated to district and county surveillance officers, and eventually reported to the national level. Improvements like these are being made all over West Africa as a response to the outbreak in areas such as Sierra Leone and Guinea (Marston et al., 2017).

 

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