The Need to Improve the Notification of Infectious Disease Systems in the UK–A Comparison of Four OECD Countries

Abstract

Reporting notifiable diseases is one of the keystones of modern disease surveillance and public health policy making. The key requirements to achieve such coming from regular, accurate, and complete reporting data. This, however, does not happen to the high rate of reporting as it should, resulting in incomplete data and thus reducing the effectivity of disease surveillance for the purpose of public health in the UK/England. A literature review was performed for the purpose of a) Analyzing if other countries similar to the UK/England also under-report notifiable diseases and b) Analyse if there are any traits which may be benchmarked in the UK/England to improve on the completeness of reporting of notifiable diseases.The papers returned from our searches showed that; a) Under-reporting of notifiable diseases also occur in other countries, not only the UK, b) Completeness of disease notification differ per disease type, c) Electronic reporting is a preferred method of notification for the purposes of improving notification rates, and d) A greater effort in many countries is required to more clearly see the severity of under-reporting that is occurring.