What is the role of Public Health in an Infectious Disease Outbreak Situation?
The Health Unit plays a strong role to control infectious disease outbreaks, such as influenza, norovirus, mumps, or meningitis.
Here is how the health unit provides direction:
- Help set policies. For example, create steps to identify and manage 65 different diseases and outbreak situations.
- Provide education. Includes information and building skills to control diseases and infections.
- Provide support in the community, by providing posters and conducting vaccination clinics when necessary.
The Health Unit also does the following to control infectious diseases in the community:
- Investigate people with a disease by interviewing and assessing them and sending samples to the lab,
- Identifies a potential outbreak,
- Works with an affected place to control the spread of infection. May include closing a classroom or school, overseeing cleaning of a facility.
- Excluding people who are affected as necessary,
- Provides information to the public through posters, radio, TV, newspapers, website and displays,
- Provides training on controlling infections,
- Looks for the source of the disease outbreak,
- Evaluates how effective our actions were to control the outbreak.
|
Printable Version