Construction of a Monitoring Ability Evaluation Indicator System for Emerging Diseases

Objective: To construct a monitoring ability evaluation indicator system for emerging infectious diseases. Methods: This study adopted two rounds of expert consultation among 11 senior public health professionals using the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the indicators and their weight coefficients. Results: The experts were aged 45.18 ± 8.44 years and had worked for 20.45 ± 9.97 years. All had a bachelor’s degree or above. The expert active coefficients for both rounds of consultation were 100%. The coefficient of expert authority was 0.861, and the coefficient of expert coordination was 0.4 for the first and second rounds of consultation (P < 0.01). After two rounds of expert consultation, the constructed monitoring ability evaluation indicator system consisted of 5 first-level indicators, 17 second-level indicators, and 45 third-level indicators. The five first-level indicators were epidemic discovery ability, epidemic report ability, laboratory testing ability, monitoring system operation guarantee, and comprehensive personnel ability. The top five secondary indicators were timely identification of infected persons, epidemic report time, timely laboratory testing, normalized monitoring ability, and funding. The maximum eigenvector (λmax) was 5.069, the consistency index (CI) was 0.017, the consistency ratio (CR) was 0.016, and CR < 0.1. Conclusion: The evaluation index system for monitoring the capability of emerging infectious diseases has scientific validity and rationality, and it can be used to evaluate the monitoring capability of emerging infectious diseases.