Inter-organisational coordination of H1N1 outbreak: data collection, and analyses of a pilot field study

Abstract

Improving effectiveness in response to H1N1 outbreaks requires us to understand how different organisations within the outbreak coordination network work collectively to share information needed to operate at optimal level. Research for developing reliable framework for the collection of inter-organisational coordinated response data and its impact on decision-making and support system for disease outbreak is lacking to date. We introduce a pilot field study using social networks based approach to capture H1N1 inter-organisational coordination data by introducing qualitative questionnaire and quantitative survey, which resulted in discovering the hidden social networks of coordination. Here, we propose a schema that can be used to classify the quantitative data collection and preparation for further empirical analysis, and suggest that lessons learned from this can be applied to explore possible data collection and analysis for other types of natural and man made crises.