Minimum, Optimum and Optional data set for Chronic Non-communicable Diseases, Violence and Injuries

This draft of Technical specifications is prepared by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Inter-programmatic Chronic Non communicable Disease surveillance working group (1) in the period of March 2007 till June 2008. The work has been based on World Health Organization (WHO) chronic disease and risk factor (RF) surveillance principles and PAHO’s Core Health Data initiative. The starting point was the list of chronic non communicable disease indicators prepared by the Caribbean Epidemiology Center (CAREC) in 2004 but that had not been tested or applied.

The working group has consulted the following materials during its work: List of CDC indicators for chronic disease surveillance (2), Canadian Primary Health Care Indicators (3), Brazil’s (4) and Mexico’s (5) national lists of indicators. List includes suggestions received from epidemiologists from Montserrat, Dominica, and Barbados, as well as from Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil within PAHO’s non communicable disease unit (NC) effort for sub regional harmonization in the English-speaking Caribbean and MERCOSUR countries, during spring of 2008