Evaluating the timeliness of reporting in a First Nations communicable diseases program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Timely reporting of communicable diseases is necessary to enable a prompt response to mitigate and control outbreaks.This is especially true among First Nations communities due to a number of factors, including unique social determinants of health, which can contribute to rapid disease transmission.Objective: To assess the timeliness of reporting for 12 notifiable communicable diseases in the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority, which includes 33 First Nations on-reserve communities in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada, and to assess whether there were differences in reporting times depending on degree of remoteness of community, season or year.Methods: Data for four sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and eight other communicable diseases were abstracted from the integrated Public Health Information System (iPHIS) between 2008 and 2013 and compared against the targets set for reporting in the Saskatchewan Communicable Disease Control Manual.The reporting time was defined as the duration from client exposure or presentation at clinic to the case notification day at Saskatchewan's Ministry of Health.Communicable diseases were evaluated for proportion of cases reported within recommended time, and mean reporting time.Geographical and reporting data were also recorded to assess variations in reporting time among different northern communities and according to season or year.Results: A total of 9,767 records were identified for the 12 diseases; all had a 14-day recommended reporting time, with the exception of shigellosis, which had a three-day reporting time.Overall, 93.6% of the diseases were reported in the recommended reporting time, although there was variability among the diseases.All four of the STIs (chlamydia, gonococcal infections, HIV and syphilis) had over 90% of cases reported within the 14-day recommended time period.Other communicable diseases reporting times varied from a high of 93.4% for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), 91.7% for lab-confirmed influenza and 89.1% for streptococcal A-invasive disease to a low of 16.2% for shigellosis and 12.2% for pertussis.Salmonellosis and pneumococcal-invasive disease were intermediary with 77.4% and 72.2%, respectively.Mean reporting times indicated that eight of the 12 diseases (66.7%) had reporting times similar to or better than recommended times.There appeared to be a correlation between longer reporting periods and the more northern communities.There were no seasonal variations found but yearly-trend analysis demonstrated an anomalous year in 2011, in which all communicable diseases with the exception of STIs experienced a peak in reporting delays.Conclusion: Overall, communicable disease reporting in this northern health authority program met recommended reporting times, although there were variations according to the disease, the area reporting and the year.Further research is needed to understand these variations in order to inform efforts to strengthen communicable disease surveillance among First Nations communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".