The COVID-19 pandemic has both underscored the importance of disease surveillance systems to facilitate rapid response to health threats and revealed the limitations of existing systems. Health authorities can use surveillance systems to detect outbreaks early, formulate effective response strategies, allocate resources efficiently, and track the impact of interventions.
Performing an assessment of a disease surveillance system is critical to ensuring that the right health information gets to the right people, at the right time, to make the right decisions for protecting the health of populations.
I-TECH, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an interdisciplinary group of public health professionals through the INSIGHT project, created the Surveillance System Assessment Toolkit. The toolkit is designed to provide organizations, agencies, task forces, or individuals wishing to assess the quality and functioning of one or more disease surveillance systems with the most up-to date approaches, tools, and training for planning, conducting, analyzing, and disseminating data from a surveillance system assessment.
This flexible toolkit provides step-by-step guidance and considerations for how to engage stakeholders in an intentional way, using participatory approaches in all steps of the assessment, and includes case studies, examples, templates, and other helpful resources.
Review the Surveillance System Assessment Toolkit.