Evaluation of the EPISOUTH Network, ECDC

ECDC plans to evaluate the EPISOUTH project which so far has been coordinated and funded by DG Sanco. The Commission has founded the Episouth Project under the strand “Responding rapidly and in coordinated fashion to threats to health” in the Public Health Programme work plan for 2006 and provided funding until 30 September 2009. The general objective of the project was to create a framework for collaboration on epidemiological issues to improve communicable disease surveillance and communication and provide training for public health experts in the participating countries. A discussion has started with the project coordinators, the Commission and the WPs coordinators on the opportunity to evaluate the Episouth as an EC funded project in the area of communicable disease that fall under ECDC mandate and assess its sustainability after the end of the financial agreement with the Commission. The interest of ECDC (and Commission) is to evaluate the added values to and the synergies with ECDC multiannual plan and consider which component may need to be integrated in annual workplan. A possible timeframe for the process is to conduct the evaluation and assessment before the 2010 planning ends in ECDC (November 2009). ECDC is currently identifying a senior project leader for this evaluation activity. In addition, we need to constitute a team of experts around this project leader, similar to the evaluation of the disease specific network evaluation teams in the recent past. Since the work packages of EpiSouth contain almost all elements that we also teach in EPIET (early warning, response, surveillance, outbreak investigation, training), I believe this may be a good opportunity for a current fellow of either EPIET/PAE/PROFET to join such a team of experts. Furthermore we send a “request for interest” to the EAN and the network of EPIET supervisors (training site forum) to ask if some of the senior among them are interested to join this evaluation team.