Surveillance reporting guide, 2015

Surveillance reports provide essential information about a disease or health-related condition according to person, time and place. They often provide the basis to identify burden of illness and may include related information, such as trends in risk factor frequency or prescribing practices. Surveillance reports inform strategies to address targeted health conditions and may identify the need for additional clinical care or public health action. They can be summaries of larger reports published in the grey literature and, increasingly, may link to a complete surveillance dataset. Surveillance reports are approximately 2,000-2,500 words in length - excluding the abstract, tables and references.

The Canada Communicable Disease Report (CCDR) supports the use of reporting guidelines, including those collected by the Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research (EQUATOR) Network^{Note 1}. However, the EQUATOR Network does not currently provide a guideline for surveillance reports, so the CCDR has developed this one based on other checklists, a guidelines for evaluating surveillance systems^{Note 2} and recent trends in Open Science.

Table 1 provides CCDR's checklist for surveillance reports. Figure 1 illustrates an example of how surveillance data is typically summarized graphically with incidence on the y axis and time on the x axis.

As with all submissions, check CCDR's Information for authors (published in January every year with the first issue of each new volume) for general manuscript preparation and submission requirements.