Department of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation - University of Toronto
The Surveillance Project - Queen's University
Introduction
The material archived on this site was created during the course of my doctoral research, which was completed in January of 2009.* It explores ‘public health surveillance’ from a surveillance studies perspective.
Public health surveillance is commonly defined as “the tracking and forecasting of any health event or health determinant through the continuous collection of high-quality data, the integration, analysis and interpretation of those data into surveillance products (for example reports, advisories, alerts, and warnings), and the dissemination of those surveillance products to those who need to know” (Canada, NAC, 2003: 92).**
It could be argued that public health surveillance is more properly described as ‘disease tracking’, and that its practices and purposes are very different from, say, the practices and purposes of surveillance undertaken by the police. Nevertheless, because public health surveillance can be implicated in social sorting (for example, sorting out ill bodies from healthy ones), it is of interest to sociologists and scholars of surveillance.
However, within surveillance studies literature, the topic of public health surveillance has received comparatively little scholarly attention. My dissertation, therefore, contributes to surveillance studies by examining an under-explored topic. In so doing, it also proposes a novel analytic approach for the study of surveillance more generally. My dissertation, entitled Picturing Public Health Surveillance, is available for download on the Documents page where you will also find some of my related work, including an article recently published in Surveillance & Society.*
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*I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for supporting this project.
** Canada, National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health (NAC). 2003. Learning from SARS: Renewal of Public Health in Canada. Ottawa: Health Canada.
Martin can be contacted at martin.french@utoronto.ca