An Independent Review of New Zealand's Biosecurity Surveillance Systems - Overall Framework For Biosecurity Surveillance

Background & Disclaimer

New Zealand's biosecurity is delivered through an interlinked set of activities that are carried out offshore, at the border and within the country. They are:

  • International negotiations on technical rules for trade;
  • Risk analysis and determination of conditions for entry;
  • Pre-border tests, inspections and information gathering;
  • Border inspections and quarantine activities;
  • Post-border detection and monitoring systems;
  • Response and control actions.

These biosecurity activities are a continuum where all activities influence and are influenced by each other. Events offshore and at the border should influence the design and objectives of the post-border Surveillance programme. Similarly detection of new organisms post-border, or changes in the behaviour or distribution of previously introduced organisms, should influence activities off-shore and at the border. Finally, decisions to control or attempt eradication of introduced organisms should lead to modified activities in the other components of the system.

This Review focuses on the application of surveillance to detect organisms that are new to New Zealand and to generate information about New Zealand's pest and disease status on an ongoing basis. These activities can be seen to stand alone from other biosecurity activities and in that sense could be called Surveillance with a capital "S" - a key component of the biosecurity management process which needs a specific and appropriate policy framework in which to operate.

Delimitation programmes, that have been undertaken following detection of a new organism to define its distribution, have not been included.

This Review has been based on a concept that Surveillance must be driven by a coherent strategy that in turn drives a set of core programmes and activities which have been loosely described as "passive" Surveillance. In addition, this is complemented by a set of focused or targeted programmes directed at particular species, pathways or habitats which have been traditionally described as "active" Surveillance.

The clear consequences of not having a structured biosecurity Surveillance system include:

  • Potential threats to our valued biodiversity;
  • Increased risk of unwanted organisms establishing in New Zealand at a level where control or eradication is either not possible or possible but not affordable;
  • Increasing difficulty in maintaining credibility of New Zealand's export certification declarations in international markets, due to a lack of confidence about New Zealand's pest and disease status by Governments and importers in other countries.

Precis:

Governance

Conceptual Frameworks

Operational Structures

Communications

Governance

The Review has found that an appropriate governance system for biosecurity Surveillance should recognise the following principles and issues:

  • The major source of funding is currently from central government under Vote Biosecurity. However, other parties can and do invest in biosecurity Surveillance programmes. Those parties notably include industry groups and regional government;
  • The intrinsic nature of biosecurity is that there is a high level of inter-dependence between all the elements of the total biosecurity risk management system, and that many different skills and activities are required for an effective programme to be designed, delivered and maintained;
  • An integrated biosecurity system requires all parties involved to collaborate in forming working partnerships; The cornerstones of this trust are likely to be based on shared knowledge, integrity and transparency of process;
  • All parties involved in biosecurity Surveillance will also have their own priorities and therefore their biosecurity commitments will be inherently vulnerable to individual organisational trade-offs they are driven to make, particularly if biosecurity is not their core business;
  • The public is inherently involved and Surveillance, more than any other aspect of biosecurity, depends on public awareness , understanding and commitment in order to be effective;
  • Biosecurity Surveillance requires a high level of specialist expertise to be maintained on an ongoing basis, even when at times the tasks involved are relatively mundane;
  • Both risks and costs can be high, requiring sharing of resources for efficiency, a sound risk management approach and a flexible but robust means of setting priorities;
  • For practical reasons there is a limit to the scope of any integrated core biosecurity Surveillance system and provision therefore must be made for individual parties to carry out their own discretionary activities outside that core. However, it is important that those discretionary activities do not conflict with or compromise the core activities in any way;
  • Sharing of information is critical for effective biosecurity Surveillance, and an appropriate governance system needs to promote information sharing rather than discourage it, and;
  • Incentives for managing the system to achieve desired outcomes may be legal, financial and motivational. It is important that the overall governance system is able to harness these incentives appropriately.

Conceptual Frameworks

The current conceptual framework for biosecurity Surveillance in New Zealand has evolved from the historic activities of the various agencies involved. More recently there has been growing concern about broader threats to New Zealand's biodiversity, human health and marine environment, giving rise to the development of Surveillance programmes more focused in these areas.

Most of the activities currently being undertaken in Surveillance however, remain quite narrowly focused within particular areas of human interest. However, the nature of biological entities is that they are not necessarily constrained by the boundaries of human endeavour.

There is also a growing consciousness that many pest and disease threats are almost impossible to predict, particularly because the behaviour of an organism outside its endemic habitat may change - so that organisms which are quite innocuous in one environment can be pests in another. There is also considerable theoretical (eg. chaos theory) and empirical (ie. history of invasions) evidence to suggest that this is in the case.

Two other key concepts become very relevant when considering planning for Surveillance. These are:

  • The need for sufficient knowledge about New Zealand's baseline biodiversity in order to be able to determine if an organism is new to the country, or behaving in an unexpected way, and;
  • The strong correlation between the probability of an organism moving out of its existing ecological niche into a new one, and the existence of a pathway by which it can do so. This means that there is a clustering of risk associated with such pathways. Accordingly, by targeting Surveillance (informed observation) at key places and times the probability of detection can be increased. This approach also increases the probability of early detection of untargeted species. For example, the incorporation of peri-port Surveillance as part of risk management for Red Imported Fire Ant incursions has recently detected two untargeted, but unwanted, species of Crazy Ants

Operational structures

The current management framework for biosecurity Surveillance at an operational level is diverse. Activities are managed in a host of different ways, as there is a multiplicity of agencies involved in the delivery of Surveillance inputs and the management system in each case is therefore reflective of the structure and standard operating procedures of each organisation.

Clearly, without an over-arching governance and reporting system, common quality standards and a consistent system selecting priorities, there is potential for significant variability in delivery of Surveillance services.

However, this Review found no evidence to suggest that operational management and the diversity of organisational structures per se are primary weaknesses of the system. To the contrary, the Review Team was impressed with the commitment and dedication of all those we have spoken with. We are confident though, that the current operational model can deliver much more consistent results given improvements to the overall governance framework. Many of the recommendations of this Review relate to the rebuilding of commitment and harmonising of systems within and across delivery agencies, as much as they do to incorporation of new thinking and approaches. It is the view of the Review Team that these outcomes will be better achieved in an environment of organisational stability.

Even within agencies, although most of the current Surveillance programmes and activities have documented specifications and/or work instructions, key components of fully functional quality systems are notably absent in many cases. Such missing components include:

  • Clear statements of goals and measurable objectives for outcomes;
  • Documented procedures that link processes to outcomes, and;
  • Regular internal audits and review processes

A further issue is that common standards are largely absent between agencies, therefore there is no objective way in which programmes can be aligned and quality of delivery harmonised. The review team was not able, during its interview programme, to identify many performance indicators that are applied to measuring the effectiveness of Surveillance objectives.

Although Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been established for pest monitoring objectives in Regional Pest Management Strategies and the control programmes for pest weeds managed by MAF they are essentially input KPIs, measuring effort not results. The only exceptions are the KPIs set for the fruit fly detection programme.

The Review found this is a significant deficiency in biosecurity Surveillance; it is essential that, as far as possible, output KPIs be set for critical objectives and it is desirable to have them for the total programme.

Examples of issues to help set appropriate KPIs include:

Timeliness of detection. There is little point in setting detection levels for new species if they are not located in sufficient time to mount a useful response. A partial analysis of recent incursions (see Appendix VIII) shows that many are detected long after they are well established.

Consistency with other biosecurity objectives. Where a response strategy is predicated on rapid detection Surveillance objectives and their KPIs should reflect those objectives.

Efficiency and effectiveness measures

  • Effective Surveillance results in detection of incursions sufficiently early to allow the option of eradication or control with a positive benefit/cost ratio.
  • Efficiency should be measured by the relative benefit/cost ratio of eradication or control programmes developed following detection of incursions. "Benefits" must include all benefits, not simply those measured by a simple monetary value. (Measurement will require consideration of responses to a number of incursions and assessment of trends will require collation of data generated over a substantial period of time.)

Compliance with quality systems. Adoption of a consistent quality system for biosecurity Surveillance systems will generate a need for KPIs to allow performance to be monitored against the standards that are set.

International acceptance. The increasing international requirements for verifiable Surveillance data to support trade also lead logically to the need for KPIs to be set for those Surveillance systems that are generating the relevant data.

Communications

Engagement of the general public in biosecurity Surveillance is a key component of ensuring both effectiveness and efficiency. There are several reasons for this:

  • History has shown that many of the new organisms found in New Zealand have been first noticed by members of the public in the process of carrying out their everyday activities;
  • Public concern about incursions of unwanted new organisms is heightened every time there is media coverage of such events. This is clearly also raising unreasonable public expectations that the New Zealand Government and its agencies will act to stop these incursions. This tendency for the public to regard detection of new incursions as institutional failure by those agencies can be seen as a `paradox of success' where increasing levels of detection are unjustly seen as border failures.
  • Heightened awareness results in increased levels of reporting of the normal as well as the abnormal. This factor is currently escalating pressure on the resources involved in processing calls and carrying out identifications.

It is foreseen that increased public education will, over time, improve the ability of New Zealanders to discriminate between endemic and recently introduced organisms thereby improving both the sensitivity and specificity of this method of detection, and ultimately its efficiency.

There is another benefit in raising the public profile and general public understanding of biosecurity Surveillance in an active and positive way. That is the positive impact such activities can have on the morale of those engaged in service provision.

By highlighting Surveillance success stories and the actions of those involved in producing those successes, not only can appropriate behaviour be promoted and rewarded by recognition but also a combination of community pride and vigilance can be built over time.

Page last updated: 16 October 2008