Surveillance In Health Care

In addition to the policy development and assurance, assessment is one of the important core functions of public health, and one of significant tools of assessing health status in the community, is through surveillance. By definition, surveillance “is ongoing collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and dissemination to those who need to know” (book p: 206).Therefore, evaluating the health system in the community, assessing the health plans, looking for any weakness or strength in the system, providing analysis for trends, and implementing future health policies and interventions, will need a system of data collections, spreading, and analyses of these data through surveillance system. Such continues collection of data can be passive, where all health care facilities need to notify the local health department for certain diseases or outbreak, or active surveillance, which is done when …show more content…
The system is based on the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) standards, and it provides information and set of criteria, called” surveillance case definition” to define a disease for public health surveillances. Therefore, health care professional staffs will use them for reporting the individual cases of notifiable diseases. These diseases could be infectious or non- infectious conditions. In addition, all local and state health authorities need to pass data about reportable diseases to CDC each week. NNDSS is an example of passive surveillance, which depends on health workers in reporting cases. Each state health department needs to maintain its national notifiable diseases list according to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists position statement, conducts the ongoing surveillances for the list, and evaluates the surveillance’s procedure continually, such as those with regard to the important of problems, the epidemiological criteria and the