The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Nutrition in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) recently hosted a four-day training session to advance the navigation of the Integrated Online Surveillance Guidelines. The Integrated Online Surveillance Guidelines is a digital platform utilized for disease tracking and data analysis to ensure timely detection, reporting and improved coordinated responses across sectors to public health threats.

Representatives from various sectors such as education, ports, tourism, environmental health, animal health and health promotion to name a few participated in the training and gained a better understanding of their role in surveillance and pathways for reporting and identifying public health threats.

National Epidemiologist Dr. Michelle Francois spoke on how the platform of the Integrated Online Surveillance Guidelines works. “As we can see, a lot of diseases are originating from animals and so we thought it was necessary in the development or the redevelopment of our surveillance guidelines to do it from a more health approach where everybody is involved in reporting. We think that is the best approach and we cannot do it alone. Because of the human, animal interface, persons need to know how they fit into the surveillance system. We also took a slightly different approach with this one as opposed to creating just a document that can be placed on a desk; what we did was make it in a webpage, an interactive webpage where persons can have access to it, so whether you in your vehicle, in office or vacation, you can access this webpage and download certain sections which are pertinent to you.”

Contractor for the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) Eden Augustus who also facilitated the training sessions spoke on the support provided by PAHO for the development of the Integrated Online Surveillance Guidelines which will contribute to the strengthening of Saint Lucia’s public health surveillance system. “Using all of the stakeholder interviews that we have done with ministries over the last three years, we have worked with the National Epidemiologist Dr. Michelle Francois to develop the “Integrated Surveillance” webpage. This webpage houses all of the roles and responsibilities for different sectors involved in health surveillance. It also includes all of the different Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for all of the Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), communicable diseases as well as environmental risk factors to help all of the different sectors in terms of what their roles and responsibilities are in disease surveillance. I think that this workshop is extremely important for Saint Lucia. It highlights all of your roles and responsibilities as it relates to health surveillance which would be the difference between catching an outbreak early on the stage and having caught the outbreak when it is already being spread.”