This informative three-week course will prepare you to meet the challenges of conducting epidemiologic surveillance to gather data to inform decision-making and planning. Using the polio eradication effort as a case study, you’ll address the application of surveillance systems in a wide variety of settings.
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Throughout the course, you’ll reflect on and apply the lessons learned from the global polio eradication initiative, an effort led by the World Health Organisation resolved to eradicate the disease poliomyelitis. You will learn lessons from this initiative - the largest of its kind in history -and will apply data for decision-making going forward. You’ll also discuss the challenges and strategies that can be presented when applying data.
You will identify various different epidemiological systems in countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, and on how to conduct data collection in remote areas. Then, you will discuss the best practices for conducting epidemiologic surveillance in a wide range of locations and will come to a range of solutions for the conclusion of how to conduct and use data in a variety of different situations.
- Conduct epidemiologic surveillance to inform decision-making
- Apply best practices for healthcare data collection and analysis
- Apply the lessons learned from the polio eradication effort
Syllabus
Polio eradication basics
This course considers polio as a case study for addressing viruses and vaccines. This module will begin with an overview of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and Implementation Science. Then, we will go into some details about the polio virus and vaccine, and eradication as a strategy for global disease control. It's important to think about how the characteristics of a disease, and the strategies chosen to control it, determine what data are collected and how.
Field Epidemiology and Outbreak Response
In this module, we will begin with an overview of surveillance systems - a core component of disease control and eradication. We will learn about surveillance as a decision support system for planned as well as outbreak responses. We will then consider various strategies for quality and complete surveillance in diverse contexts, and end the week with a roundtable discussion on conducting surveillance in hard to reach areas.
Data for Decision-making
In this module, we will begin with an overview of the different types of data collected by the polio program. We will then consider how these data are used to make critical decisions for the program. We will discuss strategies for collecting quality and complete data, and end the week with a roundtable discussion on incentivizing quality data.
