Workshop on disease surveillance ends

Islamabad

All provinces and regions were brought together at the federal level for a two-day national coordination workshop arranged to consolidate the process for designing a Pakistan-wide Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) model.

The workshop, which concluded here on Wednesday, was organized by the National Institute of Health (NIH) along with Public Health England.

Delivering the inaugural address, the Executive Director of NIH Dr. Mukhtar Ahmad said, NIH has taken the initiative for establishing IDSR for the first time in Pakistan with active participation of the provincial health departments. “This workshop is the first step for development of consensus and commitment for the next steps towards achieving this essential core capacity of the IHR. Working together, we should expect that a sensitive, effective and integrated surveillance and response system would be designed and implemented in Pakistan,” he stated.

Dr. Mukhtar presumed that the provincial departments of health will continue to support NIH in this initiative and actively participate in a series of workshops planned by NIH for developing a sustainable IDSR in the coming months.

Health professionals from all provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and other partners participated in the workshop, which featured discussion on the Federal level IDSR Situation Analysis (draft). Experts discussed why IDSR has not progressed in the past. Reflections were also made on the roles and responsibilities of the federal and provincial/region level IDSR.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) as the National Public Health Institute in Pakistan has the role of disease surveillance and response. The purpose of surveillance is safety, security and resilience of the nation by leading an integrated bio-surveillance effort that facilitates early warning and situational awareness of biological events.

It is worth-mentioning that a range of existing systems, vertical disease programmes, organizations and stakeholders play a role in disease surveillance without any mechanism for integration of surveillance data from all provinces. The situation demands a rapid and integrated approach to collect and analyze data at one central place for prompt action and decisions-making.

During 2014, Public Health England (PHE) was extended an invitation to work in Pakistan at the federal level with the Ministry of Health to provide technical support in the areas of International Health Regulations (IHR) and IDSR. As such, PHE has been working with NIH in order to take the work forward and resultantly, an IDSR system is being developed in collaboration with the provincial health departments.