CONTROL INTERVIEWING FOR OUTBREAK INVESTIGATIONS

The Centre for Food-borne, Environmental and Zoonotic Infectious Disease (CFEZID), Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), is routinely involved in multi-jurisdictional outbreaks that require investigation. As part of these investigations, analytic studies and the use of control populations as comparison groups may be indicated to strengthen the weight of evidence in identifying the source of the outbreak.  The objective of this requirement is to obtain the services of a Contractor on an “as and when required” basis to provide bilingual interviewing capacity and data entry that is scalable and can be mobilized rapidly to assist in outbreak investigations The Bidder must have the capacity of 5 interviewers on staff with additional experience in public health, health or scientific interviewing. During multi-jurisdictional outbreaks involving enteric illness, CFEZID’s Outbreak Management Division (OMD) typically leads the outbreak investigation in collaboration with Provincial/Territorial and Federal (FPT) food safety partners. As part of the investigation, OMD provides centralized collation and analysis of the epidemiologic information and may assist affected jurisdictions by providing centralized interviewing. In situations where an analytic study (ex. case control, cohort) is required to test a hypothesis, surge capacity for recruitment and interviewing of controls (people who are not ill are asked whether they ate specific food items and this information is used to compare to people who are ill) helps to ensure rapid study implementation and source identification so that public health action can be taken to control the outbreak and prevent further infections. The number of controls to be interviewed for each study will vary according to case numbers and the outbreak situation, however the Contractor should have capacity to conduct and complete up to 50 interviews rapidly during one study period (estimated time 3-5 days). The length of the survey tool will vary, however the time to complete one survey is estimated to be between 15-25 minutes. It is anticipated that OMD will require approximately 1-2 studies of this nature per year.