Question

If the overall objective reads: “To explore the perspectives of surveillance volunteers, community members and focal persons in the community-based disease surveillance system (CBDSS) regarding common challenges and advantages, in order to deduce possible approaches to sustain an effective CBDSS in Ghana.” Outline your research design to answer this research objective. [12 marks]

Answer 1

Public health surveillance is an essential function of a health system, defined as “the systematic on-going collection, collation and analysis of data for public health purposes and the timely dissemination of public health information for assessment and public health response as necessary. Public health surveillance is used for the early detection of public health events and the monitoring of the health status of a population to guide and assess the impact of interventions.

Community-based Surveillance (CBS) is an active process of community participation in detecting, reporting, responding to and monitoring health events in the community. • The main reporters are community members who detect and report cases that might be otherwise not be reported to health care facilities

Surveillance strategies such as the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response technical guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa acknowledge the role of community members in reporting cases of epidemic-prone diseases and unusual health events. CBS has been used in disease eradication programs including smallpox, guinea worm and polio , as well as during the West African Ebola virus disease outbreak of 2014–15, where community health workers and volunteers played a role in early detection and timely reporting to the health system.

Challenges-

• Workload of the CBS volunteer. Because the CBS volunteers are working effectively at the village level, there is a tendency consider expanding their role
• Acceptability of the system, based on interviews of key informants in a sample of villages
• All Health conditions are not suitable for CBS For eg STDs because of their associated social pressure and consequences

Advantages:

• To facilitate easy and early reporting, to keep vigilance at the community level

• To get the community involved so they understand their health problems.

• To help people to be free from diseases

• To improve the health of the people

• Detecting individuals who do not seek medical care

• Building health care network within community