Community Surveillance Kit

Developed by the USAID-funded CHANGE Project, this Community Surveillance Kit is meant to be a resource for countries to improve detection, reporting, and follow-up of cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) - an achievement required for countries, regions, and the entire world to be declared polio-free. Because AFP cases are rare (thus, many communities will never see one), the Kit has also been designed to facilitate ongoing community involvement in detecting and reporting other diseases and conditions including measles, cholera, neonatal tetanus, meningitis, yellow fever, births, and deaths from diarrhoea.

Besides supporting community involvement in surveillance, the Kit provides ideas for preventing diseases and ways to help communities monitor good health habits, such as hand washing and fully immunising infants. Also detailed here are positive events that communities themselves select related to improving community life beyond health.

The Community Surveillance Kit is designed specifically for situations in which there is some person who can serve as a bridge between the community and the nearest health facility. This person might be a non-government organisation (NGO) staff member, a Peace Corps volunteer, or ministry of health (MOH) staff member. The Kit and accompanying materials support this "Community Surveillance Coordinator" in orienting communities, working with them to select volunteers, supporting those volunteers, and bringing reports of AFP or other important diseases to the immediate attention of the closest health facility.

The Community Surveillance Kit consists of a number of separate documents:

For the group or committee planning the community health/surveillance activities:

• Guidelines for adapting the Kit and managing the community surveillance activity (including how to carry out rapid formative research and pretesting)
• Guidelines for training coordinators, including helping select, train, and support surveillance volunteers.

For NGO or MOH staff, or Peace Corps volunteers, who will support the volunteers:

• Handbook for community surveillance coordinators - the main sections of this handbook are:
  • An introduction that explains the purposes and uses of the Kit
  • Disease descriptions with illustrations and simple definitions of the diseases for volunteers and more detailed information for coordinators
  • Reporting procedures for coordinators and health facility staff
  • A response chart showing appropriate responses to the family and community to reports of disease
  • Prevention ideas on how communities can help prevent the diseases
  • Ideas for supporting surveillance volunteers and community involvement in preventing, detecting, and reporting cases of disease; selecting and supporting community surveillance volunteers; and keeping volunteers motivated and active
  • Guidelines for training community surveillance volunteers

For community volunteers:

• Handbook for community surveillance volunteers, which has similar, simplified sections to the above.

To supplement the Kit, CHANGE encourages country partners to consider developing job aids, including enlarged versions of the surveillance volunteers' information on disease identification, reporting, and follow-up, as well as an audio cassette tape with information from the Kit for surveillance volunteers recorded in their local language. The Kit itself is intended to be adapted - e.g., simplified or shortened - in each country where it is used.

Click here to download this publication section-by-section in PDF format.

A CD-ROM version in each language is also available; for details, please contact changeinfo@aed.org