Abstract
BackgroundPublic health triangulation is a process for reviewing, synthesising and interpreting secondary data from multiple sources that bear on the same question to make public health decisions. It can be used to understand the dynamics of HIV transmission and to measure the impact of public health programs. While traditional intervention research and metaanalysis would be ideal sources of information for public health decision making, they are infrequently available, and often decisions can be based only on surveillance and survey data.MethodsThe process involves examination of a wide variety of data sources and both biological, behavioral and program data and seeks input from stakeholders to formulate meaningful public health questions. Finally and most importantly, it uses the results to inform public health decision-making. There are 12 discrete steps in the triangulation process, which included identification and assessment of key questions, identification of data sources, refining questions, gathering data and reports, assessing the quality of those data and reports, formulating hypotheses to explain trends in the data, corroborating or refining working hypotheses, drawing conclusions, communicating results and recommendations and taking public health action.ResultsTriangulation can be limited by the quality of the original data, the potentials for ecological fallacy and "data dredging" and reproducibility of results.ConclusionsNonetheless, we believe that public health triangulation allows for the interpretation of data sets that cannot be analyzed using meta-analysis and can be a helpful adjunct to surveillance, to formal public health intervention research and to monitoring and evaluation, which in turn lead to improved national strategic planning and resource allocation.
Highlights
Public health triangulation is a process for reviewing, synthesising and interpreting secondary data from multiple sources that bear on the same question to make public health decisions
In this paper we propose a standard approach to public health triangulation and suggest scenarios in which it can enhance understanding of the national and local HIV epidemics and prove useful in programmatic decision-making
It is not a method to evaluate the performance of a newer data gathering method against an established “gold standard”. It is a not a technique for rapid assessment, such as rapid assessment and response (RAR) [28], that involve assessments in a microenvironment with data collected prospectively as well as retrospectively. These methods are different from the process of public health triangulation we describe here that involves trends in large geographical areas and rarely employ prospective data gathering
Summary
Public health triangulation is a process for reviewing, synthesising and interpreting secondary data from multiple sources that bear on the same question to make public health decisions. While traditional intervention research and metaanalysis would be ideal sources of information for public health decision making, they are infrequently available, and often decisions can be based only on surveillance and survey data. It is seldom the case that a high-quality study exists that can provide answers to everyday public health questions directly, and often we must rely upon imperfect surveillance data to guide policy and programmatic decisions. This has been the case for HIV, where the urgency of the epidemic coupled with enormously scaled-up international resources demand rapid responses in planning and targeting prevention and care programs. Diverse sources of data are rarely presented together, and gathering, synthesizing and interpreting them has become increasingly challenging
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
