Oregon Oral Health Surveillance System Evaluation: A General Interview Guide Approach

BACKGROUND:   The Oregon Oral Health Surveillance System (OOHSS) contains 29 state level data points from several sources. To date, the application of surveillance to oral disease and the data's usefulness to public health practitioners has not been evaluated. Public health professionals require accessible, current oral health data to produce reports and plan public health interventions. The evaluation aims to identify the data needs of the Oregon Health Program and improve stakeholders’ access to reliable and valid information. The information may identify data gaps and information needs for national, state and local oral health policy development and program initiatives. The evaluation’s main focus is assessing primary users’ knowledge about the OOHSS to determine how effectively oral health surveillance data are being used for the prevention and control of oral disease in Oregon. The present evaluation seeks to determine the usefulness of the Oregon Oral Health Surveillance System (OOHSS), with the purpose of informing recommendations for the revision of the OOHSS.

METHODS:   Standards for assessing the performance of the system will be conducted using the CDC 2001 Updated Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems and input from semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. The CDC guidelines are a toolkit geared to promote the best use of public health resources through the development of efficient and effective public health surveillance systems. The interviews are being conducted by phone or in person using the general interview guide approach. The guide approach intends to ensure that the same general areas of information are collected from each interviewee. This provides more focus than the conversational approach, but still allows a degree of freedom and adaptability in getting the information from the interviewee. The data collection procedure included, gathering data from the interviewees, sorting it into categories and formatting the information. The interviewees include public health workers from county and local health departments, non-profit organizations, community coalitions, and community dentists. The general interview questions consist of themes involving, awareness, accessibility, limitations, quality, timeliness and stability of oral health data.

RESULTS:   As of January 8, 2014, six interviews had been conducted with oral health data users and potential users. About 30 data users and potential data users will be interviewed.

CONCLUSIONS:   Preliminary emerging themes from the first six interviews: (1) Data users want access to the surveillance system through a website that is intelligible and easy to navigate. (2) County level raw data was requested (3) Keeping the information up-to-date.