Enhancing inter-organizational collaboration for wildlife disease surveillance in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Management of zoonotic infectious diseases is an urgent global heath imperative. Interdisciplinary approaches for zoonosis management exist in literature, but collaboratively implementing them is a pervasive challenge. The Sri Lanka Wildlife Health Centre (SLWHC) was created in 2011 to coordinate wildlife disease surveillance and response among government agencies. We interviewed SLWHC-affiliated personnel about existing communication and collaboration channels to identify operational needs as well as potential enhancements for the SLWHC's operations. We used the Policy Sciences' analytical framework to identify opportunities and challenges for the SLWHC. Study participants held both human and animal health as the utmost priorities. However, their observations indicate that inter-organizational communication barriers and intra-organizational hierarchies still need to be overcome for the Centre's partnering organizations to collaborate to their fullest potential. Any interventions to enhance the SLWHC's collaborative capacity for detecting and managing zoonotic disease outbreaks could be strengthened by appealing to participants' shared value orientations towards enlightenment and respect. A common interest was the desire to collaborate and combine resources, knowledge and personnel to detect, reduce and prevent the incidence of zoonotic disease outbreaks in Sri Lanka. These lessons about institutionalizing communication have considerable relevance for organizational responses to the current SARS-CoV2 pandemic and other zoonoses.