Syndromic surveillance has great advantages in promoting the early detection of infectious disease outbreak and enabling the real-time tracking of on-going epidemics. However, establishing a syndromic surveillance system required huge investment in money, information system, manpower and capacity building activities, which remains a big challenge in resource-limited areas. Funded by European Union's 7th Framework Programme, a syndromic surveillance system named 'ISSC' was prepared to be built and incorporated with the existing case report system in rural Jiangxi Province of China.
Objective
Before the start of ISSC project, a pilot investigation was carried out among the candidate surveillance units (health care facility, pharmacy and primary school) and related stakeholders to assess their capacity and potential needs with regard to the implementation of ISSC system, so as to design customized capacity building and training strategies.