In the present world, information technology continues to play an important role in health-care decisions, training, and public health informatics and especially among health practitioners who work directly to serve members of the public. The health and the well-being of Canadian citizens is particularly vital and is best dealt with by understanding the determinants of the disease, how it spreads from one Canadian to another and from community to community. As Flicker et al. (2004) observes, a man’s ill health and health status of the society is affected by environmental factors and lifestyle. This assignment is an examination of Canadian HIV/AIDS surveillance and how it can be made more effective in managing HIV/AIDS in Canada.
This project was started with the aim of estimating HIV/AIDS prevalence and incidents in Canada in 2008. This project was meant to provide surveillance reports to the health officials as well as providing information on the primary drug and HIV-1 Strain resistance (Surveillance - Public Health Agency of Canada, 2016). It was aimed at providing epidemiology details of how HIV/AIDS epidemic is distributed across Canadian communities by publishing HIV Epidemiology and HIV/AIDS surveillance publications. It tracks the HIV data from the youths and adults. Public health surveillance systems can be described as geo-referencing of disease epidemiological data through a structured approach that manages data. In such an approach, HIV/AIDS condition is mapped based on the surrounding environment as well as social infrastructure. This application has various modules that include several diseases and geographical distributions, planning and targeting HIV interventions, and mapping Canadian communities that are under HIV risks. It has a module to document the health care needed for Canadian communities living with HIV and assessing resources allocation (Johnson & Johnson, 2001). It also manages the patient’s care environment, human resources, supplies and materials for treating those living with HIV. In addition, the Canadian HIV/AIDS surveillance system also has a module for routing equipment, workers, and supplies to various service locations in Canada.
The HIV/AIDS Surveillance system project was initially described as an ongoing systematic assortment, understanding of data through interpretation, analysis that is combined with well-timed distribution of the data to health stakeholders responsible for controlling and averting the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus. It estimates the health behavior as well as status of HIV/AIDS in Canada as it is being served by the Canadian government and non-governmental organizations so as to measure the need for more interventions and empower decision makers in managing and leading the HIV/AIDS programs effectively by providing useful and timely evidence (Kandwal, Garg & Garg, 2009). In Canada, this project was implemented through an online tracking system that was designed to collect data from the HIVAIDS patients, the health workers, and government officials.
Information from the surveillance project is analyzed based on place, time and persons through well-informed technical personnel who carry out regular data reviews so as to ensure its validity and accuracy for top management in controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic (Nsubuga et al., 2006). Data analysis is performed through simple graphs and tables which present and summarize data before it is disseminated to policy makers for intervention programs. Public health informatics deals with classification of collected data, analysis, storage, retrieval and presentation of health data based on standardized communication infrastructure as well as policies that guide data access and sharing.
References
Flicker, S., Goldberg, E., Read, S., Veinot, T., McClelland, A., Saulnier, P., & Skinner, H. (2004). HIV-Positive Youth's Perspectives on the Internet and eHealth. J Med Internet Res, 6(3), e32.
Johnson, C. P., & Johnson, J. (2001). GIS: a tool for monitoring and management of epidemics. Proceedings of Map India.
Kandwal, R., Garg, P. K., & Garg, R. D. (2009). Health GIS and HIV/AIDS studies: Perspective and retrospective. Journal of biomedical informatics, 42(4), 748-755.
Nsubuga, P., White, M. E., Thacker, S. B., Anderson, M. A., Blount, S. B., Broome, C. V., & Stroup, D. F. (2006). Public health surveillance: a tool for targeting and monitoring interventions.
Surveillance - Public Health Agency of Canada. (2016). Phac-aspc.gc.ca. Retrieved 7 July 2016, from http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/surveillance-eng.php
