IPC/WASH Officers - NOA

The IPC/WASH Officer provides county-level technical and operational support for infection prevention and control and WASH readiness and response, focusing on Bundibugyo Virus Disease preparedness. The officer supports health departments and facilities to establish safe screening, triage, isolation, referral, environmental cleaning, waste management, and health-worker protection systems, and activates IPC/WASH measures rapidly if cases are detected.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development and implementation of a costed county IPC/WASH readiness and response action plan, aligned with the national BVD readiness and response plan and county risk profile.
• Support the County Health Department to establish or strengthen the IPC/WASH component of the county incident management structure, including clear roles, meeting schedules, action tracking, and partner coordination.
• Conduct rapid IPC/WASH readiness assessments in priority health facilities, points of entry, isolation and holding areas, laboratories, ambulance bases, and other designated sites, and maintain an updated gap and action tracker.
• Guide facilities to establish safe patient flow, including screening, triage, separation, immediate isolation, and referral of suspected BVD cases while maintaining access to essential services.
• Support the identification, preparation, and routine inspection of temporary isolation areas and referral facilities, ensuring functional water supply, sanitation, ventilation, waste systems, cleaning arrangements, and appropriate zoning.
• Train, coach, and mentor health workers, cleaners, ambulance teams, burial teams, laboratory staff, and other frontline personnel on standard precautions and transmission-based precautions relevant to viral haemorrhagic fevers.
• Ensure correct selection, rational use, donning, doffing, and disposal of personal protective equipment, including practical drills and competency checks for designated staff.
• Establish and monitor systems for hand hygiene, environmental cleaning and disinfection, safe management of linen, sharps, infectious waste, excreta, and reusable medical equipment.
• Provide technical guidance on preparation and safe use of chlorine solutions and other approved disinfectants, including concentration, labelling, storage, quality checks, and occupational safety.
• Support the development and implementation of ambulance infection-control procedures, including patient transfer, staff protection, cleaning, disinfection, waste disposal and readiness checks after each movement.
• Assess availability and functionality of water supply, sanitation facilities, drainage, handwashing stations, waste zones, power and essential IPC infrastructure, and coordinate practical corrective actions with WASH and logistics partners.
• Quantify and monitor essential IPC/WASH commodities, including PPE, hand hygiene supplies, disinfectants, sprayers, waste containers, body bags and cleaning materials, and promptly report stock gaps and pipeline risks.
• Support occupational health and safety measures for health workers, including exposure prevention, immediate reporting and management of occupational exposure, staff briefing, psychosocial support referral and monitoring of affected personnel.
• Participate in alert verification and rapid response missions when required, ensuring safe field practices, appropriate PPE, decontamination arrangements and IPC risk assessment at the site of the alert.
• Provide IPC/WASH support to safe and dignified burial readiness, including team preparation, equipment, disinfection, waste management and coordination with RCCE and community leaders.
• Work with RCCE colleagues to develop and deliver practical messages on safe care-seeking, hand hygiene, home care avoidance, safe handling of body fluids and community support for isolation, referral and safe burial procedures.
• Conduct supportive supervision and regular compliance monitoring using standardized checklists, document corrective actions and follow up until critical gaps are closed.
• Maintain county-level IPC/WASH data, including facility assessment results, training coverage, stock status, supervision findings, corrective actions, and incident reports, and submit timely daily and weekly updates.
• Contribute to county situation reports, dashboards, readiness reviews, simulation exercises, after-action reviews, and operational briefings.
• Coordinate closely with field epidemiology, case management, laboratory, RCCE, logistics, information management, points of entry, and partner teams to ensure an integrated readiness and response approach.
• Immediately notify the supervisor and relevant county authorities of any critical IPC failure, health-worker exposure, unsafe patient movement, stock-out, or other event that may increase transmission risk.
• Perform any other incident-specific duties assigned by the supervisor.

Requirements

• First university degree in nursing, environmental health, public health, medicine, clinical medicine, water and sanitation, infection prevention and control, or another relevant health discipline from a recognized institution.
• Postgraduate training or professional certification in IPC, WASH in health-care facilities, field epidemiology, outbreak response, emergency management, or a related field is desirable.
• At least two years of relevant professional experience in IPC, WASH, clinical services, environmental health, outbreak response, or health-facility quality improvement.
• Practical experience in assessing health facilities and implementing IPC or WASH improvement actions.
• Experience training and mentoring health workers in standard precautions, PPE use, environmental cleaning, waste management, or related practices.
• Experience working with government health authorities, health facilities, and partners at the state or county level.
• Experience in viral haemorrhagic fever preparedness or response, including Ebola or Marburg disease is desirable.
• Experience with WHO, a Ministry of Health, UN agencies, international NGOs, or humanitarian health partners is desirable.
• Experience in South Sudan or another complex humanitarian and low-resource setting is desirable.
• Experience supporting simulation exercises, rapid response teams, isolation facilities, ambulances, or safe and dignified burial teams is desirable.
• Sound technical knowledge of infection prevention and control in health-care and emergency settings.
• Practical knowledge of WASH requirements for screening, triage, isolation, treatment, laboratory, ambulance, and waste-management operations.
• Ability to translate technical standards into simple, feasible actions in low-resource and field settings.
• Ability to train, coach, and supervise multidisciplinary frontline teams using practical demonstrations.
• Ability to identify high-risk practices, prioritize corrective actions, and monitor implementation.
• Strong planning, coordination, problem-solving, communication, and report-writing skills.
• Ability to work under pressure, travel frequently, and operate safely in difficult field environments.
• Good judgement, tact, and ability to work respectfully with government authorities, communities, and partners.
• Good knowledge of Microsoft Office applications, particularly Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
• Ability to use digital data-collection and reporting tools on smartphones or tablets.
• Experience in maintaining simple trackers, supervision databases, and operational dashboards is desirable.
• Excellent knowledge of written and spoken English.
• Working knowledge of Arabic and relevant local languages used in the assigned duty station is an asset.

Skills

• Infection Prevention and Control
• WASH in Health-care Facilities
• Field Epidemiology
• Outbreak Response
• Emergency Management
• Health-facility Quality Improvement
• Health Facility Assessment
• IPC Improvement Implementation
• WASH Improvement Implementation
• Health Workforce Training
• PPE Use Training
• Environmental Cleaning
• Waste Management
• Government Health Coordination
• Viral Haemorrhagic Fever Preparedness
• Simulation Exercises Support
• Rapid Response Team Support
• Isolation Facility Management
• Ambulance Operations
• Safe Burial Practices
• Technical Standards Translation
• Multidisciplinary Project Supervision
• Corrective Action Prioritization
• Report Writing
• MS Word
• MS Excel
• MS PowerPoint
• Microsoft Outlook
• Digital Data Collection
• Supervision Databases
• Operational Dashboards

Languages

English