This course provides the foundational concepts and practical skills for designing and implementing surveillance systems, for using surveillance data for the conduct and evaluation of public health programs and research. Topics covered in this course include historical development of surveillance; planning a surveillance system, sources of health related information, collecting surveillance data, analyzing and interpreting surveillance data, and the use of surveillance data for public health action.
Public Health Surveillance is an ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data essential to planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice. Students seeking to understand how data influences prevention and disease control must understand the steps involved in the data collection process.
Effective health surveillance provides health information in a timely manner so that countries have the information that they need to fight epidemics now or to plan for the future.
This course will explore how public health problems have been addressed effectively by the development and maintenance of surveillance systems.
This course demonstrates how globally connected networks of public health surveillance systems can optimize disease prevention and health promotion.
This course contextualize the surveillance process including data collection, analysis, interpretation, dissemination, and health actions linked to the data.
Students from any culture will be able to assess their individual countries to understand the responsibility the country officials have for disease surveillance and response.
Students will be able to understand how systems identification and prevention of , both for infectious and noncommunicable diseases that account for the greatest burden of diseases, even in very poor countries.
This course is critical to understand how emerging and reemerging diseases are identified and prevented.