The Ministry of Health, Pan American Health Organisa-tion/World Health Organisa-tion (PAHO/WHO) and the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC) last week hosted a three-day workshop with health care workers aimed at improving their skills in investigating and controlling disease outbreaks.
“The training is aimed at improving the skills of professionals in public health and emphasises the basic techniques of infectious diseases outbreak investigations, provides participants with the knowledge necessary to investigate an outbreak and to detect early public health events, strengthen their ability to investigate and control disease outbreaks, and build capacity at regional and national levels thereby creating the decentralisation of teams that can assess and respond, and increase preparedness of the entire country,” a GINA report said.
According to Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Shamdeo Persaud,the objectives of the sessions are to protect people and to determine how the ministry develops and delivers services that could help the population lead productive lives. He noted that there is need for attention to be put on nuclear and chemical events that can also impact people’s lives. In this regard, the ministry has set up mechanisms whereby Guyana regularly provides information to the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 and WHO/PAHO in these areas; though there is need to build more capacity.
“While radio-nuclear and chemical events may not be relative to Guyana they are being used in industry and medical diagnoses, hence steps must be in place to protect people from exposure,” GINA said. Dr Persaud noted that part of the response to address suicide has been to control the sale of and access to agricultural chemicals. There are also legal and operational processes in place to control chemicals.
The CMO pointed out that it is imperative that health care workers collect good quality data in an appropriate and consistent manner and ensure that it is collated and stored in a manner that is retrievable and can be used to effectively calculate statistics that are applicable. Persaud explained that following the 2005 flood the ministry, with assistance from CAREC and other partners such as the Civil Defence Commission developed a robust and useful surveillance system that is able to identify very quickly key instances where outbreaks are assessed and treated.
World Health Organisa-tion/Pan American Health Organisation (WHO/PAHO) representative Dr Beverley Barnett noted that outbreak investigation is a critical function of the national and regional health systems especially in these times of international trade and travel, and it is necessary that all countries meet the requirements of the legally binding Inter-national Health Regulations (IHR) 2005.
“Preventing the international spread of disease is of great importance not only for health but also for national productivity and development…it is critical that an outbreak in any part of the country be detected as soon as possible so that it can be contained, and it is equally critical to detect and contain communicable diseases that can be brought in to any part of the country from outside,” she emphasised.
Dr Barnett noted that out-of-control communicable diseases can eat away at the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. In this regard, persons working in public health, health facilities, labs and other key areas must be aware, alert and skilled in the prevention, detection and control of disease outbreaks.
“If there is no efficient and effective surveillance system to detect events outside the norm that are occurring, it would be difficult to put effective measures in place to control the outbreak and prevent spread, hence the key to effective surveillance is early awareness, data collection, analysis and reporting on unusual events,” Dr Barnett noted. She also stressed the importance of training which is a reminder of the multidisciplinary nature of such investigation and the need for all stakeholders to be involved.
The workshop started on Tuesday.
