Surveillance systems reported in Communicable Diseases Intelligence, 2014.

This article describes the surveillance schemes that are routinely reported on in Communicable Diseases Intelligence (CDI). Communicable disease surveillance in Australia operates at the national, state and local levels. Primary responsibility for public health action lies with the state and territory health departments. The role of communicable disease surveillance at a national level includes: • detecting outbreaks and identifying national trends; • providing guidance for policy development and resource allocation at the national level; • monitoring the need for and impact of national disease control programs; • coordinating a response to national or multi-jurisdictional outbreaks; • describing the epidemiology of rare diseases that occur infrequently at state and territory levels; • meeting various international reporting requirements, such as providing disease statistics to the World Health Organization; and • supporting quarantine activities, which are the responsibility of the Australian government. State and territory health departments collect notifications of communicable diseases under their public health legislation. Act provides the legislative basis for and authorises the exchange of health information, including personal information, between jurisdictions and the Commonwealth. The Act provides for the establishment of the National Notifiable Diseases List, which specifies the diseases about which personal information can be provided. The National Health Security Agreement, signed by Health Ministers in April 2008, establishes the operational arrangements to formalise and enhance existing surveillance and reporting systems, an important objective of the Act. States and territories voluntarily forward de-identified data on a nationally agreed group of communicable diseases to the Department of Health for the purposes of national communicable disease surveillance. Surveillance has been defined by the World Health Organization as the 'continuing scrutiny of all aspects of the occurrence and spread of disease that are pertinent to effective control.' It is characterised by 'methods distinguished by their practicability, uniformity, and frequently by their rapidity, rather than complete accuracy. 1 Although some surveillance schemes aim for complete case ascertainment, others include only a proportion of all cases of the conditions under surveillance, and these samples are subject to systematic and other biases. Results generated from surveillance schemes must be interpreted with caution, particularly when comparing results between schemes, between different geographical areas or jurisdictions and over time. Surveillance data may also differ from data on communicable diseases gathered in other settings. This report describes the major features of the surveillance schemes for which CDI publishes regular reports. Other surveillance schemes for which CDI publishes …