State Surveillance Unit gets award for excellent work in public health surveillance

Bhubaneswar 04/11/2024:– The State Surveillance Unit, Integrated Disease Surveillance Project (IDSP), Odisha has been honoured for its excellent work in public health surveillance in the 20-year commemorative event of IDSP held in New Delhi.
This recognition is a testament of dedication and commitment of the team in safeguarding the public health in Odisha. Dr Prameela Baral, Additional Director, Public Health and Dr Ashok Kumar Paikaray, Joint Director-cum-SSO IDSP received the award on behalf of Health and Family Welfare Department, Odisha.
The Sate Surveillance Unit, IDSP Unit functions 24×7 during Disaster, Flood, Cyclones to ensure timely detection and response to disease outbreaks. The control room operates round-the-clock, monitoring disease trends, analyzing data, and coordinating with district and higher health officials.
It successfully implements and regularly monitors the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) for real-time disease surveillance. It also does daily case based real time data entry to identify trends and outbreaks.
It has been detecting and investigating the outbreaks of various diseases, such as vector-borne diseases, foodborne illnesses, and waterborne diseases, and zoonotics origin diseases and preventing further spread of outbreaks in time.
As many as 32 District Public Health Laboratories and 30 RTPCR laboratories have been established, upgraded and strengthened to diagnose the outbreak prone diseases in the State.
It has been regularly reviewing and analysing the epidemiological and laboratory data on each Tuesday and Thursday and monitoring the performance of district surveillance units on regular basis.
The Unit has been organizing training programs for healthcare providers on disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, and laboratory techniques. It has joined hands with other departments such as Fisheries & Animal Resources Development, Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, Food Supplies & Consumer Welfare, Forest, Environment and Climate Change, Water Resources, School and Mass Education and some others for surveillance of diseases of public health importance.