Methods
The Public Health Environmental Surveillance Evaluation Framework (PHES-EF) will be developed in five steps.
Study Steps
Figure 1. Overview of the development process for the Public Health Environmental Surveillance Evaluation Framework (PHES-EF)
Step 1: Establishment of the Executive Group
A multinational and multidisciplinary executive group of 12 members will oversee the development of the evaluation framework. The group will bring expertise from the following fields: mathematical sciences, social sciences, environmental and physical sciences, public health and medicine, and public interest/knowledge users.
The executive group will be responsible for providing feedback on the framework development process, connecting the study to other related projects, recruiting electronic Delphi (e-Delphi) panellists, participating in the consensus meeting, disseminating the evaluation framework, advising and/or participating in post-publication activities, and promoting the adoption of the evaluation framework among their professional networks.
You can learn more about the study executive group members here.
Step 2: Generation of Candidate Items
We will conduct relevant scoping review(s) and consult the study’s expert executive group to generate a list of PHES-EF e-Delphi candidate items.
Relevant scoping review registrations and publications can be accessed here.
Step 3: International e-Delphi Survey
We will use an e-Delphi technique to develop an internationally accepted evaluation framework for public health environmental surveillance. The Delphi method is an iterative multi-round approach that uses a series of sequential surveys, interspersed by controlled feedback, to elicit consensus among a group of individuals while maintaining anonymity (2). We will use the e-Delphi method to overcome geographic barriers and allow us to engage panellists internationally across various time zones.
For more details, see the e-Delphi page.
Step 4: Consensus Meeting
In preparation for the consensus meeting, the study working group will categorize candidate items for consideration into a preliminary evaluation framework. This will include merging and/or modifying items based on feedback gathered from the e-Delphi rounds.
An in-person or hybrid consensus meeting will be held after the results of the e-Delphi have been compiled and analysed. The primary objective will be to achieve expert consensus on the final list of items for PHES-EF, through review and discussion of salient items. This process will be guided by the empirical evidence that was identified during the scoping review(s), and the opinions gathered during the e-Delphi process.
Steps to produce the final list of items are as follows: (i) present the results of e-Delphi exercise (name, rationale, and score of each item); (ii) discuss the rationale and relevance for including the items in the framework; and (iii) vote on equivocal and non-consensual items. PHES-EF will be developed based on the final list of items that receive consensus during the executive group consensus meeting.
Step 5: Dissemination of Evaluation Framework
The development of the evaluation framework will be reported in a statement document that will include the rationale and a brief description of the meeting and the panellists involved. The evaluation framework will be made available as a preprint, prior to publication in an open-access peer-reviewed journal. PHES-EF will be made available using an open license (CC-BY-SA-4.0 license).