Strengthening of Communicable Diseases Surveillance System in Lithuania

The global crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that the public health preparedness and responses to such critical events need to be urgently improved at all member states individually and as well at European level. In Lithuania we plan to strengthen infectious disease surveillance systems at the national level, with improvement of integration, interoperability and digitalization of data sources and focus on sentinel surveillance, hospital surveillance, vaccination and AMR surveillance. Our general objectives are to improve and to strengthen national surveillance system by digitizing currently missing surveillance data, ensuring high-quality data collection, transmission and timely exchange between stakeholders and by strengthening the competences and abilities of public health staff and providing specific knowledge on management and surveillance of communicable diseases. For the achievement of the goals set by the LT-Surveillance project and the implementation of the planned activities, the forces are mobilized by five partners who are strong in expertise in public health, (clinical) microbiology, epidemiology, and data-science. Within the framework of the project, we plan: 1) to continue digitalization of information systems and to facilitate missing data exchange between healthcare and public health authorities and to ensure that as much epidemiologically relevant data as possible is digitized; to develop a centralized system for informing the population about the timing of vaccinations that it is expected will help to increase vaccination coverage; 2) as recommended by ECDC to strengthen the integrated surveillance of acute respiratory infections; 3) to reinforce and build capacities for surveillance of communicable diseases, including outbreak investigation, management of tuberculosis, vaccination, etc.; to train the trainers and to cascade the knowledge gained; to create the platform with the training material for specialists.