Assessment on surveillance, investigation and control capacity based on the International Health Regulations (2005) in border districts of Thailand, 2014

Abstract

Background: The Bureau of Epidemiology had developed the bordered-SRRT because the border area was one of sensitive target of International Health Regulations (IHR) activities. In 2014, the first assessment of bordered-SRRT had been carried out, in order to identify gap of capacity that need for improvement. The result was focused only for the basic sub-indicators since this was the minimum criteria to pass the assessment.
Methods: This was a developmental research which was divided into 2 parts: 1) developed SRRT-border assessment tool in Thailand, by merging IHR 2005’s assessments tool for surveillance and response component with Thailand’s SRRT assessment tool (revised 2012 version) 2) assessment of SRRT teams of 9 provinces: Chanthaburi, Trat, Sa Kaeo, Kanchanaburi, Mukdahan, Tak, Nan, Ranong and Yala. The public health personnel at district level were interviewed, including reviewed of relevant documents.
Results: The SRRT-border assessment tool composed of 21 main indicators and 84 sub-indicators (compare with 13 main indicators and 57 sub-indicators of general SRRT), which divided into 3 levels: basic, good and excellent. It was separated into 4 domains: surveillance, reporting, disease control and quality output. The results from the 30 border districts in 9 provinces showed that 12 districts (40.00%) passed all 33 basic sub-indicators. When we analysed by domains, 83.33% of border districts passed all surveillance sub-indicators, also 83.33% for reporting sub-indicators, 60.00% for disease control sub-indicators and 73.33% for quality output sub-indicators.
Conclusions: Overall, less than half of border districts pass the assessment of basic level. The highest problems came from disease control sub-indicators. These problems came from multiple causes such as not well understanding of some indicators, systematic problems of epidemiological workforce and problem from relaxation of the performance after passing the SRRT evaluation on previous years.