Surveillance in Public Health Explained

Hello and welcome to this video where we are going to be learning About Surveillance in public health.

Public health surveillance is defined by the World Health Organization as;
the continuous, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice. Surveillance can serve as an early warning system for impending public health emergencies, document the impact of an intervention, or track progress towards specified goals, and monitor and clarify the epidemiology of health problems, to allow priorities to be set and to inform public health policy and intervention strategies.

Who is in-charge of Surveillance?
Disease surveillance activities are carried out by Population and Public Health Division within the Ministry of Health and Public Health Units within Local Health Districts. Surveillance systems are particularly important in supporting a public health emergency response.

Routine sources of health surveillance information include:

The Notifiable Conditions Information Management System (N-C-I-M-S) – who collects information on conditions notifiable by laboratories, clinicians and Public Health institutions.
Data from registers such as the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages.
Public Health Emergency Department Surveillance Systems – continuously monitors near real-time separation data for a number of conditions from most emergency departments, as well as ambulance dispatch data for metropolitan areas.
During a public health emergency response, additional monitoring and surveillance activities may include:

Hospital-based surveillance of patients admitted to hospitals and/or intensive care units with suspected or confirmed illness.
Monitoring of self-reported rates of illness in the community through the health survey programs.
Sentinel surveillance through hospitals, outpatient clinics or community-based health services.
Monitoring the effectiveness of, and adverse events associated with, medications and vaccines.
Actively gathering information from international and national surveillance networks and the media to monitor changes in disease and health events of interest.
Monitoring health services and school absenteeism rates.
Maintaining close links with epidemiologists in agricultural and veterinary disease surveillance is important in promoting awareness of potential environmental hazards and supporting effective exchange of information during outbreaks of zoonotic disease.

Types of Surveillance:
Surveillance activities can be either passive or active.
Firstly, In passive surveillance, the health department passively receives reports of suspected injury or illness. Think of this as waiting for disease reports to come to you. Many routine surveillance activities are passive—for instance, systems keeping track of communicable diseases, cancer, and injuries. Epidemiologists collect case reports that are sent to them by health care providers, laboratories, schools, or other entities that are required by law to report this information.
Secondly, In active surveillance, on the other hand, epidemiologists actively seek out cases of disease. For example, during an outbreak of salmonellosis associated with a specific source (say, a restaurant), epidemiologists may contact health care providers in the area and ask each for a list of patients seen with symptoms consistent with salmonellosis. These patients are then contacted to see if they were exposed to the suspected source (the restaurant). The benefit of active surveillance is that it generally results in more complete data, while passive surveillance relies on others (who have numerous duties other than disease reporting) to report cases. The downside to active surveillance is that it is more resource-intensive, with increased personnel and financial requirements.


In Summary
Public health surveillance is a tool to estimate the health status and behaviour of the populations served by ministries of health, ministries of finance, and donors. Because surveillance can directly measure what is going on in the population, it is useful both for measuring the need for interventions and for directly measuring the effects of interventions. The purpose of surveillance is to empower decision makers to lead and manage more effectively by providing timely, useful evidence.

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