SIERRA LEONE – According to the World Health Organization (WHO), public health experts in Sierra Leone are meeting to review data of the past three months on trend of priority diseases in the country.
WHO announced that the conference will see the attendance and participation of health experts drawn from the technical and administrative levels, from the national and districts in the country as well as partners.
The quarterly meeting will provide a unique platform for public health experts including national and district health authorities and partners to share information and ensure data harmonization in Sierra Leone.
In addition, the meeting will take a collaborative approach in a bid to adopt viable solutions that will jointly enhance effective performance of public health surveillance activities and improve progress in vaccine preventable diseases in the country.
The public health experts will monitor and evaluate the surveillance indicators and performance of three key components specifically disease surveillance, laboratory capacity and the immunization programmes for the period April to June this year.
Effective public health surveillance is one of the important strategies for disease prevention and control in a country.
The experts will review the indicator for COVID-19 disease surveillance and plan for a possible upsurge of the disease while surveillance and laboratory officers will participate in refresher training to strength surveillance of vaccine preventable diseases.
WHO revealed that Sierra Leone has made significant progress in achieving targets of the WHO regional and global public health surveillance indicators despite the challenges and disruptions of planned activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health and Sanitation with the support of WHO and other partners tracks the occurrence of priority diseases, conducts active case search, case investigation, specimen collection and laboratory investigation.
WHO Representative in Sierra Leone Dr Steven V Shongwe observed that progress has been made in disease surveillance in Sierra Leone as evident in the quality of the weekly data that is reported from all public health facilities across the country.
Dr Steven V Shongwe said that WHO prioritizes bringing together the people who generate public health surveillance data together with the national authorities and health development partners that would eventually use the data for decision making.
“We consider bringing together the people who generate these data and the national authorities and health development partners that would eventually use the data for decision making, as a matter of utmost priority for achieving health security and universal health coverage,” he further said.
At the same time, WHO Sierra Leone Country Office is providing technical and financial support to enhance the country’s diseases surveillance capacities by facilitating supportive supervision, district meetings and national review meetings like this one.
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