Communicable Diseases Surveillance

What we do

Introduction to the work undertaken by the Surveillance Policy and Systems Section, Office of Health Protection, Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.

Ms Krissa O'Neil (A/g)
Surveillance Policy and Systems Section
Surveillance Branch
Office of Health Protection
Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing

The Surveillance Policy and Systems Section coordinates the national surveillance of notifiable and other communicable diseases, manages and liaises with specific communicable disease surveillance programs, provides expert technical advice on surveillance and epidemiology across the Surveillance Branch, and fosters collaboration on national strategies to improve communicable disease surveillance.

Surveillance activities

The two main surveillance systems maintained by the Section are:

• the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) which collates information on over 60 diseases of public health importance; and
• the Virology and Serology Laboratory Reporting Scheme (LabVISE) that collates data on the laboratory identification of viruses and other organisms in a number of sentinel laboratories across Australia.

The Section provides surveillance data to inform disease control activities and/or policy initiatives both at the national and jurisdictional level. Data from these surveillance schemes are published quarterly in the journal Communicable Diseases Intelligence (CDI) and are reported on this website fortnightly. Specific communicable disease surveillance programs that report in CDI include:

• foodborne disease;
• gonococcal infections
• HIV/AIDS;
• influenza;
• meningococcal infections;
• rare paediatric communicable diseases;
• rotavirus;
• tuberculosis; and
• vaccine preventable disease and childhood immunisation coverage.

The Section is also responsible for implementing the Biosecurity Surveillance System (BSS) and the Syndromic Surveillance System (SSS) projects. The BSS project is an initiative of the Australian Department of Health and Ageing which aims to leverage e-technologies for support of surveillance, management and reporting of disease incidence and outbreaks in the Australian Community.

The BSS project strategy is to build on and strengthen existing systems and components of public health infrastructure and to identify and close exigent gaps, in order to enhance and upgrade national Biosecurity surveillance.

The BSS program includes:

• the development of the Health Alert Network, a secure, national communications and document management system;
• the development of an outbreak management system to monitor and manage outbreaks of disease; and
• enhancements to the current NNDSS.

The SSS project is intended to strengthen national sentinel surveillance and provide early warning of an influenza pandemic in Australia. The SSS will provide an IT system to enable timely transmission, central storage, and timely reporting of nationwide sentinel data on influenza-like illness. The SSS will leverage off, and be integrated with, the network, applications, infrastructure and protocols developed for the BSS.
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