Instructions
There has been identified a list of items that describe the various building blocks of surveillance systems. They have been broken down into sections (belonging to either surveillance system or surveillance component level), namely:
- Surveillance system – Context / background
- Surveillance component – Component characteristics
- Surveillance component – Target population
- Surveillance component – Enhancements
- Surveillance component – Testing protocol
- Surveillance component – Study design
- Surveillance component – Sampling strategy
- Surveillance component – Timeliness
- Surveillance component – Results
- Surveillance system – Interpretation
- Surveillance system – References
Those items are intended to be part of a checklist within the surveillance reporting guidelines. A detailed description of each item within the aforementioned sections is provided in the description page.
Note that some items in the checklist might be critical to report for some surveillance objectives but optional for others. Therefore, for each of the four surveillance objectives it has been indicated whether each item is critical or optional to report, by using the following color coding:
| Disease status | Surveillance objective | abbreviation | Critical item | Optional item | Irrelevant item |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Known absent | Disease Freedom | DF | ✔️ | ➖ | ❌ |
| Present (sporadic/endemic) | Case detection | CD | ✔️ | ➖ | ❌ |
| Present (sporadic/endemic) | Prevalence estimation | PE | ✔️ | ➖ | ❌ |
| Exotic or (re)emerging | Early Detection | ED | ✔️ | ➖ | ❌ |
- A critical item is a piece of information that is very important to report in order to understand and interpret surveillance outputs.
- An optional item is an additional piece of information that might enhance the interpretation of surveillance results if reported, but that won’t hinder such interpretation if not reported.
- An irrelevant item usually does not pertain to a specific surveillance objective (e.g. timeliness of detection is very relevant for early detection but not relevant for demonstrating disease freedom).
In any case, any surveillance item can be reported, regardless their objective−specific relevance.
The list of surveillance items to report with objective-specific relevance can be found in the checklist page