Management Response and Action Plan – Audit of Surveillance Activities

Recommendation 1

It is recommended that the Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control and the Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention work with the Chief Health Surveillance Officer to ensure that a process for public health surveillance decision making is implemented.

Management agrees with the recommendation.

As noted in the audit, to date, significant progress has been made in establishing an "advisory structure" to support Agency decision making related to surveillance and to support better communication of surveillance activities.

The PSSP2 is building upon this structure to establish a corporate process for surveillance decision making and a framework to ensure strategic alignment of surveillance activities within the Agency. This process will include the assessment of new and ongoing Agency surveillance and surveillance–related activities against a specific set of corporate, strategic and public health criteria.

EC approved corporate decision–making process for public health surveillance.

March 2014

Chief Health Surveillance Officer; Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control; and Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention.

It is recommended that the Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Diseases Prevention Control and the Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in conjunction with the Chief Health Surveillance Officer establish a schedule to complete the remaining data quality assessments.

Management agrees with the recommendation.

The Agency data quality framework has been completed. Going forward, every surveillance program will perform regular cyclical assessments of the quality of their databases using the revised data quality framework.

To expedite the completion, a Data Quality Assessment Critical Path (agreed upon by the Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control Branch and Health Promotion Chronic Disease Prevention Branch) will be developed. It will outline a schedule for completing data quality assessments of surveillance activities using the PHAC Data Quality Framework.

A Data Quality Assessment Critical Path

January 2014

Chief Health Surveillance Officer; Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control; and Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention.

Recommendation 3

It is recommended that the Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Diseases Prevention Control and the Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention work with the Chief Health Surveillance Officer to determine the privacy implications and requirements for each surveillance activity.

Management agrees with the recommendation.

The Agency is committed to protecting the privacy of Canadians. The Agency is now working within an enterprise Health Canada/Public Health Agency of Canada Privacy Management Framework that includes tools and processes to assess the privacy risks associated with program specific personal information sharing.

Some programs have had privacy impact assessments to date and a number of assessments are currently being completed. Privacy impact/risk assessments will continue to be performed on an ongoing basis following the guidance provided by Access to Information and Privacy Program contained in the Privacy Management Framework and associated documents in order to identify and mitigate any new privacy risks.

Gap analysis and status summary of  privacy assessments for all surveillance activities

January 2014

Chief Health Surveillance Officer; Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control; and Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention.

Critical path for Privacy Assessment of the Agency's surveillance holdings using the PMF and PIA Toolkit (ATIP)

March 2014

Chief Health Surveillance Officer; Assistant Deputy Minister, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control; and Assistant Deputy Minister, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention