Swiss Public Health Conference 2024
3 - 4 September 2022, Fribourg
Strengthening the Culture of Public Health Surveillance
Cancer, environmental risks, inequalities in health status and access to health care, as well as emerging infectious diseases, highlight the need to strengthen health surveillance. Surveillance requires data, the ability to interpret data, and, ultimately, a process to make the information derived from these data useful for decision-making.
In the "infodemic" and "big data" age, access to diverse data has increased enormously, opening up new possibilities for surveillance. At the same time, Switzerland is struggling to define what is needed for a reliable and efficient health information system. How should we assess cancer burden or environmental risks? How do we monitor the quality of health care? What surveillance tools do we need and want? And what about governance?
Public health surveillance lies at the interface between applied public health, population-based health sciences, and epidemiology, and therefore concerns all actors who want to protect and promote the health of the Swiss population.