Member Of The CPRC Shares What A Normal Day At Work Looks Like
The National Crisis Preparedness and Emergency Response Centre was created to manage the Covid-19 outbreak in the country.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel for the latest stories and updates.
Although the face of the country’s fight against Covid-19 is health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, he actually has a whole specialised team working behind him to keep track of the outbreak. They’re called the National Crisis Preparedness and Emergency Response Centre task force.
In a nutshell, the task force collects data, analyses it and translates all the information into a statement that is simple, concise, and easy to understand. They review all the data received for the day and only have less than four hours to issue a daily report.
Recently, a member of the task force shared through a post on Facebook what a day of work looks like for him.
Satu hari di Team Data CPRC Kebangsaan. Hari kami bermula setiap hari pada pukul 8 pagi. Tepat pada waktunya Tan Sri…
Posted by Fadly Khairie on Saturday, 17 October 2020
According to Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie, every day he starts work at 8am sharp with a meeting between Dr Noor Hisham and all the other stakeholders at the Health Ministry (MOH) involved with managing the Covid-19 outbreak.
These include head of departments and health experts who discuss current issues, details on new cases of the day, active clusters, the status of hospitals and health clinics across the country, human resources, and other measures that need to be taken to address any problems that come up.
Then, each member will return to their respective teams to complete their work for the day.
For me, I’m with the data team. Lead by Dr Hazlina Yahaya and Dr Sharul, the data team consists of several officers from various departments within MOH. Only Dr Hazlina and Dr Sharul are permanent personnel from the surveillance branch of the Disease Control Division. The rest of us are a specially assembled support team to manage data for the Covid-19 crisis in the country.
Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie via Facebook (Translated from BM)
Following the meeting, they start receiving reports and notifications of positive cases discovered from midnight to noon for the day. All information received is studied and verified to ensure all the data is accurate and true.
Each Covid-19 positive patient is assigned a case number for de-identification. This allows analysis of all information related to the patient while ensuring patient confidentiality.
For each positive case identified, the patient’s socio-demographic information, cycle threshold value (CT value), cause of infection, type of screening, and risk of transmission to the community will also be noted.
On top of that, Fadli said that connections between cases are also studied, especially those involving other states. If connections are found, a discussion will be held with the state or district involved to announce identified clusters. This allows proactive action and screening to be conducted in the localities involved.
The critical time for us is between 4pm and 5pm. All the data collected needs to be finalised to that it can be announced during the Health director-general’s press conference.
Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie via Facebook (Translated from BM)
Before Dr Noor Hisham can give the updates, a verification and counter check process is done to ensure there are no errors in the data. These need to be done fast and accurately.
Which means that when the number of cases for that day is high, data analysis becomes just as difficult.
Whatever happens, having zero-error and 100% accuracy is always our goal.
Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie via Facebook (Translated from BM)
The same data is then passed to the other teams for further analysis. The analysis of all this data is used to make important decisions regarding curbing the spread of Covid-19 in the country.
Fadli said that the final data would also undergo a geocoding process for townships and district classification to be used by the MySejahtera team for the app’s hotspot tracking process.
That is how the day finally ends, and the next day we’ll repeat the same cycle all over again. We try our hardest to provide the best solution for the country to win its war against Covid-19. However, all of this would be meaningless without the cooperation of all parties.
Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie via Facebook (Translated from BM)
Share your thoughts with us on TRP’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
