13-member response team formed to deal with outbreaks
SINGAPORE — A 13-member national outbreak response team was formed on March 1 to boost the efforts of healthcare institutions to deal with disease outbreaks, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) yesterday in an update on actions taken following last year’s hepatitis C outbreak at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH).
The team will respond to an outbreak as directed by the ministry’s Director of Medical Services. Its members include senior infectious disease physicians such as Associate Professor Brenda Ang, Professor Leo Yee Sin and Adjunct Associate Professor Lim Poh Lian from Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Also in the team are SGH nursing division assistant director Lee Lai Chee and National University Hospital assistant director of nursing Sharon Salmon.
The setting up of this team comes ahead of the completion of a review by a taskforce to strengthen outbreak detection and response. The taskforce, led by Minister of State (Health) Chee Hong Tat, is set to complete its review by June.
Some of the taskforce’s recommendations will be implemented earlier though. For instance, doctors and laboratories will have a simpler process for notifying and reporting infectious diseases to the MOH. The reporting timeline will be standardised to “within 72 hours” except for a pre-specified list of diseases that require quicker reporting. For urgent cases, the doctors and labs can call MOH’s hotline directly. Pre-specified diseases include the Zika virus and the Middle East Respiratory Coronavirus, while hepatitis C is notifiable within 72 hours.
Another change by this year will see doctors having to report suspected cases to MOH just once, instead of twice now (the second report after they receive laboratory confirmation). Under the new arrangement, MOH will use notifications and data from labs and match the results directly.
The taskforce’s work includes a review of the list of notifiable diseases under the Infectious Diseases Act and modes of notification, timelines and escalation process. Set up after investigations and recommendations by an independent review committee on the hepatitis C outbreak — which affected 25 patients, of whom eight have died — the taskforce will provide an update at the end of its review.
The independent committee, led by Prof Leo, had found that the current national surveillance system worked well for detecting community outbreaks of known infectious diseases, but not for unusual healthcare associated infections such as hepatitis C. Transmission of hepatitis C is blood-borne and it is not easily picked up by surveillance due to a relatively long and variable incubation period, with patients not showing symptoms.
