Emily Wheeler, Nursing Program Manager, ASHM
Clinical posts from members and guests of the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine (ASHM) from various international medical and scientific conferences on HIV, AIDS, viral hepatitis, and sexual health.
Why can’t our surveillance systems work for those who we are notifying about?
Ben Cowie, ID physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Epidemiologist at the WHO Regional Reference Laboratory for Hepatitis B, Victorian
Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, presented a thought provoking session yesterday on actively linking epidemiology with public health policy and resourcing.
Ben explained that we have a responsibility to make the surveillance systems work for the individuals the surveillance system is capturing data on. He
advocated for using surveillance systems to deliver health outcomes, not just measure them.
Seems like a very logical message – so why don’t we do this automatically?