Australia is partnering with the Pasifika Medical Association (PMA) to deliver Ngalu Fānifo, a culturally driven pilot program designed to build capacity and capability of Pacific practitioners and communities in Tonga and Vanuatu, strengthen services across community, primary care and hospital settings, and support families to manage their own mental wellbeing. 

ASTEROID will develop and deliver a program of training materials to strengthen infection prevention and control in health facilities in Timor-Leste.

The team brought together and upskill frontline healthcare practitioners through running training programs such as the Advanced Field Epidemiology Training Program in PNG (A-FETPNG).

This program involved fellows who identified national priority areas and key focus areas for operational research. They then worked with policy makers, program managers, educators and health care workers to address these priority areas.

Around the world, having sufficient people trained in contact tracing has proven to be one of the key factors to successfully containing outbreaks of COVID-19, as well as other infectious diseases.

At the end of this project, FEiA will have trained up to 42 staff in field epidemiology who can conduct surveillance and implement public health interventions to help health authorities respond more quickly and effectively to disease outbreaks such as COVID-19.

At the end of the project, Pacific Island countries will have a cadre of well-trained field epidemiologists who can conduct co-ordinated disease surveillance and outbreak investigation, as well as carry out research to inform local and regional health priorities.

APCOVE will bring together 40 experts from veterinary schools across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the Asia-Pacific to design open source, online training modules and case studies, that will be used to train veterinarians in core epidemiological skills. The modules and case studies will teach several of the World Organisation for Animal Health’s Critical Competencies of the Performance of Veterinary Services, building skills in outbreak investigation and response; surveillance and data analysis; risk assessment and disease control; one health and biosecurity and leadership and communication.

Across the Indo-Pacific, gaps in workforce capacity present a major health security threat. Australians have great expertise to offer countries across the Indo-Pacific in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious disease threats. The Health Security Corps was established to deploy volunteers and build capacity for the prevention, detection and control of infectious disease.

Epidemiologists play a critical role in national and regional health security. Sometimes known as “disease detectives”, epidemiologists collect and analyse data from the field to understand the causes of infectious disease outbreaks and advise on containment measures.

The Indo-Pacific region’s health security system, or its ability to avoid and contain infectious disease threats with the potential to cause social and economic harms on a national, regional or global scale, has many weaknesses in both human and animal health. In the last 20 years approximately two-thirds of all new or re-occurring infectious diseases affecting people have originally come from animals. These types of diseases are called zoonoses.

During both animal and human disease outbreaks, field epidemiologists (‘disease detectives’) are needed to help identify the source, trace and predict the spread and plan the best response. But there are insufficient field epidemiologists in many developing countries including in the Indo-Pacific region. There is also a lack of trained experts to help these countries implement their animal health plans.