Submission ID 131833
| Background | Community-Based Surveillance (CBS) enables the systematic detection and reporting of public health events by trained community volunteers in real time. By extending traditional surveillance to the community level, CBS empowers local actors to identify health threats early and trigger rapid responses. Within the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (RCM), CBS has been adopted as a core component of the Community Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness Programme (CP3). The RCM has developed a standardized CBS methodology in which community-selected volunteers detect and report health signals via SMS messages to trained supervisors who verify alerts and escalate them through established pathways to local health authorities. This approach is designed to complement, not replace, formal national surveillance systems by filling critical detection gaps at the community level, particularly in fragile, resource-constrained, and crisis-affected settings where traditional indicator-based surveillance may not reach. The CBS model operates through close coordination with Ministries of Health and relies on digital platforms to enable real-time data collection, aggregation, and analysis for rapid public health decision-making. Despite growing adoption, the evidence base for CBS remains largely descriptive. Questions about when and where CBS is most appropriate have become urgent in the face of global humanitarian funding cuts. Decision-makers urgently need evaluative evidence to prioritize interventions that offer the greatest added value in specific contexts. This symposium presents a convergent parallel mixed-methods evaluation conducted through the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program (Public Health Agency of Canada / Canadian Red Cross) that assessed CBS appropriateness across implementation contexts. The evaluation triangulates multiple data sources to determine whether CBS is acceptable to stakeholders, timely enough to function as an early warning system, and useful in producing actionable public health data, and critically, in which contexts these attributes hold. To ground the evaluation findings in practice, the symposium will feature a case study illustrating CBS implementation in a specific operational context. The case study, to be selected and presented during the session, will demonstrate how the CBS model was adapted to local conditions, the challenges encountered during deployment, and the measurable outcomes achieved in terms of early detection and community engagement. This real-world example will serve as a focal point for panel discussion, allowing participants to critically examine the translation of evaluation evidence into operational decision-making. |
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| Learning objectives | By the end of this session, participants will be able to: 1. Describe the CBS model and how it complements traditional public health surveillance in resource-constrained and crisis-affected settings. 2. Critically appraise how the evaluation attributes of acceptability, timeliness, and usefulness can be applied to assess community-led surveillance interventions. 3. Identify the implementation contexts in which CBS is perceived as most effective, as well as contexts where it may not warrant prioritization, based on evaluation findings. 4. Discuss strategies for sustaining community-led health interventions amid humanitarian funding fragmentation. |
| Topics | This symposium will combine short presentations with facilitated discussions by a panel. Key topics will include: • Operational design and implementation of CBS as a community-led early warning model within the RCM • Mixed-methods evaluation design for assessing surveillance system attributes in humanitarian and low-resource contexts • Stakeholder perspectives on CBS acceptability across community volunteers, National Society staff, and local health authorities • Timeliness of CBS reporting and escalation pathways compared with traditional surveillance systems • Usefulness of CBS data for public health decision-making and the conditions under which CBS data translates into action • Contextual factors shaping CBS effectiveness, including fragile health systems, population mobility, and integration with national surveillance • Sustaining community-driven surveillance models amid humanitarian funding contractions and the loss of donor-driven programming • Translating evaluation evidence into advocacy tools for CBS integration into national health system architecture |
| Main Messages: | MAIN MESSAGES • CBS demonstrates that communities can serve as architects of their own health security when equipped with training, tools, and clear integration pathways into formal surveillance systems • Evaluating CBS through acceptability, timeliness, and usefulness reveals that these attributes do not uniformly hold across all implementation settings, reinforcing the need for context-specific evidence to guide resource allocation • Triangulating qualitative stakeholder perspectives with quantitative performance indicators strengthens the evidence base and supports accountability for community-led interventions • Sustaining CBS beyond donor funding cycles requires transitioning from externally funded projects to locally owned components of national surveillance, co-developed with Ministries of Health • Global health actors should prioritize evaluative over descriptive evidence for community-based programs to enable equitable, needs-driven investment in epidemic preparedness • Action-oriented, community-centred approaches to surveillance can strengthen health equity and local resilience, particularly in underserved and crisis-affected communities |
| Presenters and Affiliations | Maria Munoz-Bertrand Canadian Red Cross Arwen Barr Canadian Red Cross Nevena Veljanovic Canadian Red Cross |
