gms | German Medical Science

Background: Surveillance systems for non-communicable diseases (NCD) are an important tool for detecting trends in population health and may serve as evidence-based guidance for decision-making. The appropriate dissemination of the surveillance results remains a challenge due to the varying requirements and needs of different user groups in the field of public health. Analysis of the requirements of users with regard to the dissemination of results of a surveillance for NCD was carried out. Existing formats of information dissemination in the project diabetes surveillance at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) were evaluated [1].

Methods: Between October 2022 and January 2023, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with professionals from the fields of health politics, healthcare, research and media recruited on the basis of a purposive sampling strategy. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and a qualitative content analysis was conducted. The interview texts were initially coded according to main categories (including “content requirements” and “format requirements”) developed a priori and in accordance with the interview questions. The results were then interpreted according to the model of Population Health Monitoring by Verschuuren and van Oers [2].

Results: Information on disease frequencies, risk factors, health care utilization and consequences of diseases were the most prominent content requirements across all user groups, as were influencing context factors. In contrast to users from politics and the healthcare system, who preferred an interpretation and explanation of the surveillance results, users from the field of research stated that they are more interested in the data itself for independent analyses. Also, recommendations for actions on top of interpretations of the data were an important requirement in users from politics and healthcare system. Requirements regarding the format in which results were presented varied between the user groups. Aspects which facilitate utilization were trustworthiness of the institution conducting the surveillance, actuality of data, relevance, accessibility, findability and comparability. In addition, a central platform for NCD-related information was demanded.

Conclusion: Results show that description and interpretation of results on NCD and recommendations for action are relevant for professionals in health politics and healthcare. Requirements for dissemination from user perspective were seen on each level of the model of Population Health Monitoring. The evaluation of the dissemination strategy of the diabetes surveillance has shown that many requirements are already met by the existing formats. However, there is a need to have a bigger scope of surveillance, e.g. to expand the surveillance system by other NCD. Further research and

continuous dialog with users is required for the development of more specific formats to ensure knowledge transfer to the user groups of surveillance systems.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that a positive ethics committee vote has been obtained.