Surveillance and Monitoring of NCDs and Mental Health

SUBMENU

SURVEILLANCE
MONITORING
REPORTING

Good-quality health information is essential for planning and implementing health policy in all countries. PAHO provides ongoing technical cooperation to Member States by supporting the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information on country-level noncommunicable diseases and risk factors to support decision-making.

PAHO Response

The NMH Surveillance and Monitoring team supports the development and implementation of standard methodologies for data production while strengthening countries' surveillance capacity and fostering the use of data to guide policy.

Contact the surveillance team

nmhsurveillance@paho.org

SURVEILLANCE

Public health surveillance is the ongoing systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health data essential to planning, implementing, and evaluating public health practice. It is an essential public health function.

Key data sources for NCD and risk factors surveillance include vital statistics, cancer registries, primary health care information systems, and population-based surveys.

Population-based surveys provide a comprehensive snapshot of a population's health status over a certain period without leaving anyone behind. They require the application of scientific methods, such as the use of probability sampling to obtain information representative of a population. Population-based surveys on NCD and risk factors include household, school-based, and mobile phone surveys.

Surveillance tools:

MONITORING

In response to the growing burden of NCDs and their risk factors, countries have made global and regional commitments, such as the endorsement of the Global and Regional Action Plans for the Prevention and Control of NCDs, and the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations. Furthermore, countries have adopted monitoring frameworks to track progress towards implementing policies and interventions, such as the NCD Global Monitoring Framework.

In order to fulfil its mandate to monitor countries’ progress in preventing and controlling major noncommunicable diseases, PAHO periodically assesses national capacity for NCD prevention and control using a number of monitoring tools.

Monitoring Frameworks

Monitoring tools:

REPORTING

The availability of data to guide the implementation of policies and interventions is essential to strengthening health systems. The NCD Surveillance team strives to make available data from all NCD surveillance activities and supports open data access to improve evidence-based and data-informed public health programming for NCD prevention and control.

The WHO NCD Microdata Repository contains reports, fact sheets and data sets from relevant surveys which have used the standardized PAHO/WHO tools and methods for undertaking population based surveys on NCD risk factors and related behaviours.

ENLACE data portal is PAHO’s one-stop shop for epidemiological, health policy, and strategic data related to noncommunicable diseases, injuries, disabilities, rehabilitation, and mental health. Through interactive data visualizations, ENLACE makes it easier for users to explore data, discover information and share insights to support the efforts to improve the health and well-being of people in the Region of the Americas.

Reporting tools: