Use of participatory approaches for the evaluation of animal health surveillance systems in northern countries

Accurate evaluations of surveillance systems are keys in the guidance for critical health decisions and policy issues. However, current guidelines and frameworks used for evaluation are often providing a list of attributes (indicators) with no or few details about the methods used to measure these attributes. By reviewing the advantages and limits of existing methods and tools we highlighted the needs for innovative tools to assess specific attributes or to address specific evaluation questions. Indeed socio-economic and cultural context of surveillance are hardly ever considered within the evaluation process. Therefore we have identified a list of attributes that could be assessed completely or partially with the use of participatory approaches in order to improve the completeness of surveillance systems’ evaluation process. Moreover, these approaches should lead to improved recommendations and to a better acceptability by the stakeholders.