To investigate healthcare workers’ perceptions of the integrated disease surveillance and response (IDSR) strategy.

A cross-sectional survey of healthcare workers (HCWs) was conducted from December 2021 to June 2022 to assess their perceptions of the IDSR system attributes.

Of the 409 respondents, 12 (2.9%) reported no prior training on disease surveillance. The IDSR was deemed simple, acceptable, useful, and timely by most participants. There were sharp differences in perceptions of flexibility and simplicity between doctors and the other healthcare professionals. However, acceptability, timeliness, and usefulness were uniformly perceived. Healthcare workers with at least 11-years’ experience perceived the usefulness of the IDSR system significantly higher than those with lesser years of experience. However, work experience did not have an impact on HCWs perceptions of the simplicity, timeliness, and flexibility of the IDSR system.

Most healthcare workers have positive perceptions of the IDSR approach. However, there are reservations about how well the system can adapt to changing conditions and demands (flexibility) and how well it simplifies the implementation processes. These findings demonstrate the necessity of adopting cutting-edge strategies for capacity building as well as ongoing professional development of healthcare professionals responsible for the implementation of the IDSR strategy.

The increased threat of natural disasters makes understanding the relationship between community resources and children’s mental health critical. Mental health care efficacy and access are crucial to assessing the quality of community mental health care availability.

The primary objective of this scoping review is to investigate the relationship between children’s mental health and community mental health resource efficacy and accessibility after a major disaster

Conducted a systematic search to identify epidemiologic and health service utilization studies assessing the relationship between disasters and subsequent health service utilization amongst children and adolescents.

The research returned 1682 potentially relevant studies and 31 articles were selected based on identified criteria from pre-selected databases.

The studies conclude a gender and age-based disparity in access and efficiency of children’s mental health services. The studies also identify the need for greater resource distribution and organizational structure.

Food security during public health emergencies relies on situational awareness of needs and resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized situational awareness during crises, allowing the allocation of resources to needs through machine learning algorithms. Limited research exists monitoring Twitter for changes in the food security-related public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to address that gap with AI by classifying food security topics on Twitter and showing topic frequency per day.

Tweets were scraped from Twitter from January 2020 through December 2021 using food security keywords. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was performed, followed by time-series analyses on topic frequency per day.

237,107 tweets were scraped and classified into topics, including food needs and resources, emergency preparedness and response, and mental/physical health. After the WHO’s pandemic declaration, there were relative increases in topic density per day regarding food pantries, food banks, economic and food security crises, essential services, and emergency preparedness advice. Threats to food security in Tigray emerged in 2021.

AI is a powerful yet underused tool to monitor food insecurity on social media. Machine learning tools to improve emergency response should be prioritized, along with measurement of impact. Further food insecurity word patterns testing, as generated by this research, with supervised machine learning models can accelerate the uptake of these tools by policymakers and aid organizations.