STATISTICAL PRINCIPLES OF MONITORING AND SURVEILLANCE IN PUBLIC-HEALTH

  • 1 January 1978
    • journal article
    • research article
    • Vol. 56  (5) , 713-722
Abstract
Monitoring and surveillance are seen as statistical procedures that help health authorities to achieve better health services with the existing resources, monitoring being an integrated system of making observations on health and environmental factors and of scrutinizing, storing and retrieving those data, and surveillance being a closely associated system for collating and interpreting the data. Monitoring should be an action-oriented activity and may encompass a wide range of health activities, i.e., communicable and noncommunicable diseases, environmental pollutants and specific problems in health care delivery systems. Monitoring and surveillance systems are related to control measures, and since the available resources are usually limited, a scale of priorities is developed by the statistician in cooperation with the competent authorities. Monitoring may be performed on the individual or aggregate level and should be planned to take into account the course of the disease under consideration: it is concerned with monitoring stimuli and events. Collection of data, i.e., on exposure to a pollutant, may be continuous and automatically recorded, or regular or irregular through population sampling or registries. The statistical requirements of monitoring and surveillance systems are discussed and a checklist of features to be considered is given in an annex.

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