“I work behind the scenes – you could call me a ‘disease detective’, analyzing data and piecing it all together to tell a story about what’s happening in the community. This helps inform our Public Health team leaders about what they need to do in our common goal to keep people in the community healthy.”

“I’m an epidemiologist for the communicable disease and immunization program in Population and Public Health and I’m part of the Population Health Observatory team. As an epidemiologist, I look for patterns and causes of disease in populations. I work behind the scenes – you could call me a ‘disease detective’, analyzing data and piecing it all together to tell a story about what’s happening in the community. This helps inform our Public Health team leaders about what they need to do in our common goal to keep people in the community healthy. When COVID-19 hit, we needed to quickly translate data into actionable insights for our COVID-19 response. Our team has been responsive and adaptive to meeting those evolving information needs for data across the organization. It was important to understand the epidemiology of the virus itself and to find out how it’s transmitted, who it is impacting and who is at greatest risk. An initial, urgent ask of our team was to look at data to understand the exposures of all our COVID-19 cases in the community and see how many cases were linked to other cases, community clusters, or a known outbreak. We checked to see if there were any similarities in terms of the person, place and time. That really helped leaders understand the transmission chains in the community and gave a larger picture of what was happening so we could work to stop those chains of transmission. The information we provide is used to plan and provide programs and services to our community. A great example of this is when we looked at data and found there was a disproportionate number of people in certain sub-populations having issues with self-isolation. They may have had housing issues or lived in a multi-generational home where self-isolation was difficult. Medical health officers were then able to work with partners to provide support for people with these challenges. Within the organization, we worked closely with partners in acute care, long-term care, System Optimization, Informatics, Workplace Health and Infection Prevention and Control. We also worked with our provincial partners and the BC Centre for Disease Control to share solutions and collaborate to use a standardized approach across the province. I’m proud of how our team came together to feed pertinent information to appropriate places and stakeholders. We are all so passionate about what we do and about making a difference to the health of our communities.”