Performance Evaluation Of Integrated Disease Surveillance And Response (Idsr) System: A Case Of Managing Suspected Cholera Cases In Nairobi City County

Abstract

The research study aimed at assessing how the Integrated Disease Surveillance System (IDSR) was performing in managing disease outbreaks in Nairobi County. In particularly it sought to find out how the system was meeting its intended purpose of early warning and providing information necessary for carrying out health action to mitigate morbidity and mortality during outbreaks such as cholera or even highly communicable disease such as Ebola. To achieve its key objective, the research focused on studying four areas including determining the adequacy of IDSR as an early warning system, establishing the relevance of the IDSR data, determining the effective usage of IDSR information and the establishing the status of community-based surveillance/event-based surveillance. The study deployed both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. The ongoing response to cholera in Nairobi provided the research with an opportunity to obtain information from an actual outbreak response. The study used descriptive analysis, Chi-square and correlation analysis to analyze the quantitative data while the process of coding was used to organize and analyze the data. IDSR as it is, provides relevant data for health action against outbreaks such as cholera. However, for large outbreaks, the system could fail in providing timely and complete data to manage such outbreaks. This is occasioned by late reporting, frequent server downtime, inadequate capacity in case detection and inconsistency in the flow of data from the community. Limited ability to analyze data at the ward level is also a hindrance to utilization of data. In conclusion, the system is meeting its core functions of disease detection, registration, reporting, confirmation through laboratory and epidemiology, analysis and interpretation and feedback, even though the above issues need to be fixed. It is recommended that the national and as well as the county government should build the capacity of the health workers at the ward and health facility levels and of the community health workers. The ministry of health should invest in performing similar studies in the country