Principles of Public Health Surveillance and Time Series Analysis
The scope of the course was to strengthen public health surveillance capacity in EU Member States and the European Economic Area (EEA) by harmonizing approaches and methods for early warning and coordinate interventions against public health threats in the EU.
The objective was to strengthen participants’ knowledge and skills related to the public health surveillance systems, their attributes, principles of evaluation of the surveillance systems and analysis of surveillance data for generation of warning signals of communicable disease outbreaks affecting their country or more than one country in the European Union.
The course had two major pedagogical components:
- the self- learning module and
- a face to face training workshop.
The curriculum included:
- Self-learning (knowledge refreshment) part:
- Principles of public health surveillance;
- Key attributes of surveillance system;
- Standards of data quality
- Methods for descriptive data analysis;
- Methods for evaluation of surveillance systems.
Competencies acquired in face to face module should enable participants, by completing the training, to conduct the following activities independently:
- Knowledge of the objectives of time series analysis (TSA);
- Data requirements, components of the TSA;
- Prepare data sets;
- Decompose a time series, model a time series using cyclical regression;
- Analyse residuals of model using the correlogramme;
- Use forecast and build detection interval to detect signals;
- Interpret the results of TSA.
Participants were invited to self-study a minimum set of background concepts and principles and assess their refreshed or acquired knowledge. This part was made available in August 2016 as a preparation for the face to face course. The face to face course was focused on applying knowledge during exercises and case studies facilitated by experienced filed epidemiologists and educators.
The proposed participants were epidemiologists from EU member states (MS) and EEA countries, with at least three years of experience, involved in surveillance, working in public health preferably at the national or regional level.
