Nutritional surveillance in Ireland: theory and practice.

A decade has passed since the Food Advisory Committee (FAC) of the Irish Department of Health advocated the establishment of a nutrition policy for Ireland (Food Advisory Committee, 1979). The FAC noted that such a policy should provide for ‘. . . a national strategy for improving the nutritional status of the population . . . based on thc coordinated planning and development of sectoral activities related to the supply, consumption and biological utilization of food’. Further, the FAC considered that ‘. . . a national system for the continuous assessment of food and nutrition conditions should be developed on the basis of surveillance indicators and periodic micro-surveys’. At that time a basic nutritional surveillance (NS) system was undergoing development in the Departments of Statistics and Community Health, Trinity College, Dublin, and with the support of the Agricultural Institute. Subsequently, in 1984, the Minister for Health formally established the programme, and to date a number of reports have been produced (Kelly & Kevany, 1985; Kelly, 1986, 1989~). The issues which will be considered in the present paper include: the purpose and scope of NS, its relevance to Ireland at this time, and certain practical aspects such as data requirements and analysis. Current constraints on the system are identified and its future needs indicated. These topics receive only a general treatment in the present paper, a more detailed exposition of the rationale and methodology for NS will be found in Mason et af. (1984) and Kelly (1987, 19896).