Dr. Romana Haneef, Epidemiologist at Santé Publique France, on behalf of her Burden of Disease team, is in the burden-eu spotlight to discuss the development of the French national burden of disease study
Why your institute is undertaking a national burden of disease study in France?
Recently, Santé Publique France has launched the national burden of disease initiative in collaboration with CNAM (Caisse National d’Assurance Maladie: National Health Insurance Fund). The main objectives of this national initiative is to support the decision-making process for public health policy in prevention and health promotion, to reduce the health inequalities and to build our capacity and skills on burden of disease methods. We have adopted a step-wise approach to our study. During the first step, we will focus on calculating the burden of premature mortality at national level in 2016 in collaboration with the Center of Epidemiology for medical causes of death (CépiDC).
Our team presently consists of seven members: four epidemiologists, two statisticians and a health economist. Six of the team contribute on a part-time basis, and we are currently considering bolstering our support by hiring an additional statistician to assist with activities.
How the French national burden of disease study will benefit from burden-eu
Our team does not have any prior experience in undertaking a national study, and therefore will rely on the technical support of burden-eu to take forward particular aspects of our study. We believe that our active participation in various network activities will help us to build our technical capacity, and understanding, in burden of disease methods. We are also looking to learn from others about strategies to address data gaps within our study, and to develop approaches to increase the translation of results into policy action. We hope to continue to establish new, and strengthen current, scientific collaborations with network members for future research projects.
How the French national burden of disease study will benefit burden-eu members
Although we are at the start of the journey in our French study, we have recently coordinated efforts across Europe to develop a paper on recommendations to plan a national burden of disease study, which has recently been published at BMC Archives of Public Health. This illustrates that other networks members can usefully contribute to network activities, regardless of how developed their national activities are. We will continue to share our experiences, and challenges, from the French context to aid the wider development and harmonization of approaches within the wider burden of disease community.
Further information on the recommendations to plan a national burden of disease study be found in the journal publication below.
