The five objectives in detail
Each with what it means in practice and what would count as failing it.
Sufficient and appropriate epidemiological data
Fulfilling the goals of a study or programme, and identifying preventable cases, epidemiological patterns and the risk factors associated with a disease.
Failure looks like: a large dataset from which no rate can be calculated because the denominator was never recorded.
Prevention and control of communicable disease
Under authorised surveillance: identifying cases, incidence and prevailing levels, impacts and trends.
Failure looks like: a case identified and coded, and nothing happening next.
Timely transmission
From local to provincial and national agencies for analysis, and timely reporting of the summary back to clinicians and public health officials.
Failure looks like: data flowing upward and nothing flowing back down, so the clinicians who generated it never learn what it showed.
Meeting the information needs of institutions and the public
Governments and their regulatory programmes, health care professionals, voluntary agencies and the public — on risk patterns and trends in the occurrence of communicable disease.
Failure looks like: a report only a statistician can read.
Feasible objectives, and honest evaluation
Assisting development of feasible objectives for prevention and control, interventional strategies for outbreaks, and timely investigation and evaluation of control programmes — with realistic objectives, reducing preventable cases by periodically evaluating the effectiveness of the surveillance system itself, for cost and for progress towards control.
Failure looks like: a surveillance system nobody has ever evaluated, which is most of them.
Hold us to these.
They are the standard we ask to be judged against.