The National Health Department’s Child Health Advisory Committee has produced an Annual Morbidity & Mortality Report since 2010. These reports summarise paediatric admissions and outcomes in hospitals in PNG. The reports contain important clinical and public health recommendations for improving child health.
The World Health Organisation declared Papua New Guinea free of polio and leprosy in 2000. However surveillance is still essential for polio and for other diseases. PNG has a program for reporting of acute flaccid paralysis (for polio surveillance), and acute fever and rash (for measles and rubella surveillance). Reporting forms for these and other notifiable diseases can be downloaded here. Reporting of these diseases requires that health workers know how to identify a suggestive clinical syndrome and take the appropriate test to confirm or exclude the diseases under surveillance. PNG also has surveillance for rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, and severe acute watery diarrhoea (to identify cholera outbreaks).