Rationale and objectives

As national malaria programs transition towards elimination from control, surveillance becomes a greater priority. The surveillance strategy must be comprehensive and tailored to a country’s needs, and it must be well executed and supervised. Surveillance is also an important part of the documentation for malaria free certification.

Through consultation with the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN) country partners it is clear that there are gaps in capacity in national programs with regards to surveillance, in particular active case detection methods and execution, stratification processes, and surveillance data analysis. Response to surveillance information has also been identified as a weak area.

By the end of the training students will be able to:

• Describe the main principles of malaria and the role of surveillance and response in malaria control, elimination, and prevention of reintroduction
• Describe how their malaria passive case detection and active case detection reporting system functions
• Identify the ways to conduct and use stratification and a spatial decision support system to improve the quality and effectiveness of the malaria control program and in particular of surveillance and response
• Describe the type of data analysis and appropriate responses that can be executed with their program surveillance data
• Describe an action plan for implementation of strategic planning and enhancement of interventions in their national malaria programs

This training is part of a series of capacity building trainings by APMEN.