Challenges of a Medical Surveillance Program

Some of the challenges one may find in the daily management of a medical surveillance program include high turn-over rates of administrative staff in the physician offices. This leads to incorrect billing and difficultly in getting all employee documents sent back to the safety department to be placed in the employee files. Be prepared to have employees (and supervisors) complain about long wait times in the doctor’s offices.Companies of this type struggles with getting employees to go when they have been scheduled, and often numerous reminders have to be sent out. Ideally, it would best if an organization could provide on-site physician or occupational health nurse services, but this may not be an option for everyone.

In addition to the challenges of a Medical surveillance program is also the challenges to effective global surveillance and response to human disease outbreaks which reflect deficiencies in:

(1) health infrastructure;
(2) human, technical, and financial resources; and
(3) international policies.