Infection Control Specialist

Mersal

Core responsibilities and duties:

• Policy development: Create, modify and update policies and procedures for infection prevention and control program according to updated guidelines ensuring they align with national and international standards.
• Monitoring and auditing: Conduct regular rounds and audits to monitor compliance with infection control rules and identify areas for improvement.
• Surveillance: prevent/ decrease hospital acquired infections by a group of coherent activities:
• Staff training and education: Provide training and education to medical and non-medical staff on proper infection control practices.
• Risk assessment: Perform risk assessments and inspections of hospital environments to identify and mitigate potential infection hazards.
• Data and reporting: Maintain infection control records, track infection rates, and prepare reports for management and regulatory bodies.
• General IPC policies affecting most of the medical services affecting hospital departments (aseptic technique, correct PPE use through donning and doffing, waste segregation, transmission based precautions)
• Specialised care units with special procedures need detailed focus for better medical management (radiology department, laboratory and specific outpatient units)
• Make quality based Monitoring for medical practices (types of procedures, categories of HCW or certain risky procedure)
• Follow-up trends and deviations in medical practices and make possible roots cause analysis.
• Provide methods and solutions to improve staff practices and services through step wise application and measurement.
• Report and give feedback about improvement and practices defects that need further investigation.
• Track, collect and analyse data regarding patient vital signs, symptoms and clinical data on regular basis.
• Make staff interviews to track any new patient conditions change.
• Conduct surveillance program validation according to updated case definitions.
• Investigate suspected outbreaks to identify causes and implement preventive measures.
• All hospital staff to be aware about the standard precautions (hand hygiene, PPE, waste segregation, linen management, NSI management etc )
• Special units (ICUs) to be aware about (care bundles, isolation precautions etc )
• Daily assessment for hospital wide structural threats to the patient health.
• Units-wide surveillance for transmissible illnesses from staff to patients by visual or conducted inspection if needed.
• Risk due to re-emerging community organisms through epidemic or pandemic diseases affecting the hospital and the patient health.
• Key skills and qualifications
• Professional background: Qualifications typically come from a background in nursing, microbiology, epidemiology, or a related healthcare science.
• Analytical skills: Ability to analyse and interpret infection control data.
• Investigative skills: Capability to investigate outbreaks and root causes of infections.
• Communication skills: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills for educating staff and consulting with medical professionals.
• Documentation skills: Meticulous record-keeping and report-writing abilitie
• Records for all KPI generated data for any future refer or retrieva
• Records for NSI incidents, suspected outbreak investigations and occupational staff health issues
• Reported cases to national regulatory bodies (MOH re-portable diseases etc )