Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Health Trends and Surveillance

Course Description

This course blends theory and practical knowledge that are crucial to planning, organizing, interpreting, and communicating surveillance information in the context of current public health practice. This course focuses on the kinds of work performed in government and public health agencies and so is a complement to other courses in the program which focus more on academic research skills (CHL5402). Broad in scope, this course will discuss the design and evaluation of surveillance systems, identify current systems across Canada and touch on legal and ethical issues in public health surveillance. This course will share the basic elements common to the application of surveillance to any type of public health problem using examples from health conditions currently under surveillance.

This course uses lectures, a learning lab, readings, case studies and assignments to give students a broad overview of this field, while permitting individual choice in pursuing selected topics in more depth. As a graduate course, it emphasizes self-learning.

Course Objectives

• To explain the basic principles and concepts related to the design, management, and evaluation of public health surveillance systems, including legal and ethical considerations.
• To identify and make use of data sources at the local, provincial, national, and international levels.
• To describe how to design, implement and evaluate a public health surveillance system.
• To calculate measures of disease occurrence, risk and trends using surveillance data and identify key findings, including clearly communicating key findings.
• To discuss the multidisciplinary nature of public health surveillance, requiring knowledge and skills in epidemiology, statistics, informatics, program management and evaluation.
• To demonstrate professional skills of public health epidemiologists including time management, ethics and accountability, critical thinking and collaboration, and communication skills as needed to address real-world public health problems.

Methods of Assessment