Comparison between the weekly returns service and the Oxford regional sentinel practice scheme for monitoring communicable diseases

Abstract

Weekly data for seven conditions reported to the weekly returns service of the Royal College of General Practitioners' Birmingham research unit over a 52-week period have been compared with those reported to the Oxford regional sentinel practice scheme. The mean weekly recorded rates for otitis media, asthma and intestinal infectious disease were similar in both systems; in the weekly returns service, mean weekly rates for common cold, acute bronchitis and influenza/influenza-like illness were approximately twice and for sore throat/tonsillitis slightly higher than rates in the Oxford scheme.

In the weekly returns service no recommendations are made about criteria for diagnosis but in the Oxford scheme diagnostic criteria agreed by the participants are used. Where rates in both monitoring systems are the same, agreed criteria are likely to be conventional clinical practice and therefore superfluous. Where rates are different, the use of criteria enhances specificity of the information content but results in an underestimation of the total incidence of - respiratory disease presented to general practitioners.

For common cold, acute bronchitis, otitis media and influenza/ influenza-like illness the associations between the rates in the two systems were high (R≥O. 79), as might be expected, but these high values cross validate both recording systems in their monitoring of trends. For the remaining (non-epidemic) conditions the associations were low. There were no significant associations between the rates for asthma and the upper respiratory infectious diseases in either recording system, which suggests there was effective discrimination of asthma.