Key Area 8: Public health intelligence
This area of practice focuses on the systems and strategies that are essential for organisations to base practice and policy on sound intelligence. It uses the skills of key areas 1 and 2 to establish intelligence systems, integrating the skills and methods of routine and ad hoc data and research evidence into systems and strategies.
This area involves a clear understanding of the systems and capacity needed to deliver surveillance and early warning functions and costs effective interventions. This includes the quantification of performance management systems for health care and public health systems. This area addresses systems that should deliver intelligence using formats and methods that are relevant to particular needs and specific to particular audiences.
Learning experiences
By the end of phase 1 trainees will know the different sorts of intelligence and how they are used by practitioners, decision makers and policy makers.
By the end of phase 2 trainees will know a wide range of specific sources of intelligence including their quality and relevance in specific circumstances. They will be capable, and will have had experience, of assembling such intelligence to provide valued decision support to practitioners, senior decision makers and policy makers.
By the end of phase 3 trainees will be skilled at working with senior management in understanding the intelligence systems required to develop interventions to address the needs* of sub populations served. Trainees will be able to effectively use public health intelligence in the development, implementation and evaluation of policies and strategies. The trainee will understand how to evaluate their actions and will be able to identify why/if a contribution appears to have been unvalued or unsuccessful and have subsequently developed alternative strategies. By the end of training trainees will be expected to have contributed to the surveillance of the public's health from within, or via, a local, regional or national intelligence unit.
*needs as expressed through population preference and through objective measurements
Potential vehicles for the demonstration of this competence area include:
- Implementation of national surveillance policy
- Quality assurance activity
- Data flow analysis
- Development of systems to extract intelligence and decision support from data sets
- Production of a major data rich report (eg public health annual report)
Potential settings for the demonstration of this competence area:
Learning outcomes in health intelligence can be gained in service work through links with specialist health intelligence units such as:
- public health observatories,
- cancer registries and
- QA reference centres.
Work in academic departments and health protection will expose trainees to public health intelligence.
Links to Knowledge and Skills Framework
- C1: Communication
- IK2: Information Collection and Analysis
- IK3: Knowledge and Information Resources
Knowledge Base
Advanced techniques in surveillance and dissemination
Methods of trending and modelling health status
- Linkage of data sets;
- Design of knowledge management systems for both data and research literature (libraries);
- The role of ICT in intelligence based and evidence based decision support;
- Integration of clinical data systems and population based systems to reduce inequalities and improve health;
- Technical, legal and ethical issues relating to data security, disclosure and trust.
- Pseudonymisation.
The role of information and intelligence in policy formulation and implementation, and in local clinical and public health practice.