PHEM Officers Certified in Dire Dawa

The Ethiopian Public Health Institute’s (EPHI) Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) certified health workers from Dire Dawa, Somali and Harrari regions who completed the Frontline Field Epidemiology Training Program (Frontline-FETP) after completing the evaluation workshop held in Dire Dawa city from May 10-11, 2018.
According to Abdulhafiz Hassen EPHI’s PHEM officer FETP is an applied public health training program and established to enhance the epidemiologic capacity of the public health workforce and increase the use of science and data to appropriately respond to public health threats.
“FETPs help countries to meet their core capacity requirements for surveillance and response under the revised International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005),” added Abdulhafiz.
Frontline FETP is a three-month in-service program that focuses on detection of and response to diseases or events of public health importance or international concern. This training program will reinforce participants’ current responsibilities and prepare them for the program’s field activities.
The training aims to build lower level public health staffs to recognize Public Health priority problems pertinent to the population, improve completion and accuracy of surveillance data reporting and analysis so as to provide a descriptive analysis of a Public Health problem at all levels, improve culture of data-based decision making at all level and provide Public Health Emergency officers at all levels with epidemiologic skills to conduct effective Public Health Surveillance, Case investigation, Outbreak investigation, response, and Communication.
After completion of the courses, the trainees are expected to conduct regular site visits, data quality audits, and feedback to reporting sites, analyze and interpret surveillance data regularly, prepare surveillance summary reports useful for PH health decision-making, regular production of surveillance summary reports, better use of data in PH decision-making, monitor and assess the quality of local PH surveillance data, conduct case investigations or participate in outbreak investigations, etc.
Totally 44 health workers, representatives of CDC, WHO, woredas, zones and PHEM officers from Harrari, Somali and Dire Dawa have participated on the workshop.