Country support

Country missions

During 2022, work began on a corporate country mission report form and a central repository for the reports. This work helps to ensure a corporate, harmonised approach to country missions. The creation of a central repository will make reports easier to retrieve for the required follow-up and recommendations. Country missions will be carried out at the invitation of a country or following a dialogue between ECDC and the country experts.

Country overviews

The country overviews dashboard aims to reuse data which has been collected by ECDC or is available as open data source from WHO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurostat, and other organisations.

Country-specific information is collected to give ECDC a better understanding of the country context, strengths and vulnerabilities in relation to infectious diseases and public health systems. At the same time, the intention is ‘to give the data back to the Member States’. ECDC collects a large amount of data from the Member States, some of which it aims to give back so the experts can use it for evidence-based practice and/or policy.

The country overview dashboard is organised in seven areas: diseases and health issues; surveillance information; country and health governance; microbiology; preparedness and response to public health emergencies; workforce capacity and digital public health. Building on the proof-of-concept work carried out in 2021, work during 2022 focused on content (definition of indicators), data sources and visual mock-ups in all seven areas of the dashboard. In addition, work has started on the IT tool for the visualisation of the indicators. The target date for full release is mid-2023. Once the product is ready, it will be shared and discussed with the representatives of the CCBs on a bilateral basis.