ECDC country visit to Montenegro to discuss surveillance of communicable diseases

During this ECDC technical visit, it was observed that Montenegro is continuing to make improvements in the area of surveillance. However, some systemic challenges remained. Based on the assessment, ECDC recommends that Montenegro should:

• Review and possibly update surveillance objectives;
• Establish a link between clinical and laboratory data reporting forms/data;
• Explore the possibility of including the Clinical Centre of Montenegro and the private healthcare sector in the electronic-based surveillance reporting system;

• Consider automating:

  • the monitoring of data quality indicators,
  • the production of routine outputs, and
  • the signal detection;

   

• Pilot the use of tools to detect signals for outbreaks (e.g. the EpiSignalDetection tool);
• Explore the possibility of advanced analysis of the surveillance data, (e.g. more risk factor analyses);
• Strengthen laboratory capacity for priority pathogens to support the surveillance system and consider increasing sequencing and molecular epidemiology capacity;
• Strengthen cooperation with private healthcare providers for the purposes of surveillance (e.g. diagnosis of cases, reporting, etc.)
  ECDC could provide support for some of these activities, including:
• Training in the preparation of surveillance outputs, including running R scripts or mapping with ECDC’s Map Maker tool (EMMa);
• Training in data management to help automate data cleaning