The International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the world's largest humanitarian agencies, provides relief, rehabilitation, and post-conflict reconstruction support to victims of natural disaster, oppression, and violent conflict in 42 countries. The IRC is committed to bold leadership, innovation, and creative partnerships. Active in public health, education, livelihoods, women's empowerment, youth development, and protection and promotion of rights, IRC assists people from harm to home.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is unprecedented in scale and in the response required. No previous outbreak has had as many confirmed cases or as wide of a geographic spread. The situation is complicated by the porous nature of the region's borders, inaccessibility of the terrain, and the presence of multiple active sites of transmission. The outbreak in Sierra Leone started in May 2014 and has rapidly spread due to porous borders, insufficient contact tracing, community fears, and misperceptions.
SCOPE OF WORK: The IRC is currently leading the Ebola Response Consortium (ERC), a group of ten non-governmental organizations who are supporting surveillance and contact tracing in nearly every district of Sierra Leone. The objective of this support is to provide technical support to ERC partners at the district level to ensure that surveillance activities can detect cases rapidly and enable isolation and treatment of cases immediately. One of the strategies that ERC partners are currently supporting is the roll out of Community Event-Based Surveillance (CEBS), a nationally-approved approach that uses a network of Community Health Monitors to detect and report on a defined set of "triggers" that may indicate that Ebola transmission was ongoing in a community so that these events can be rapidly investigated and followed up on.
The ERC Surveillance Manager will be responsible for supporting the implementation and strengthening of CEBS and other surveillance activities at the district level. Working in close collaboration with the ERC organizations, District Health Management Teams, WHO, CDC, and other district partners, the Surveillance Manager will play a key role in both ensuring the technical quality of CEBS roll out and in building district capacity in community-based surveillance more broadly so that the CEBS approach can continue to be used for other diseases after the Ebola outbreak has finished. To date, much work has been done in constructing the building blocks of alert and response-ensuring adequate phones, cars, etc.-and it is now necessary to move towards increasing the completeness and accuracy of the work.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Provide rapid and exacting technical assistance to ERC partners in the core aspects of surveillance for a large-scale Ebola outbreak, including: alert and dispatch systems, case investigation, contact tracing, data analysis and visualization
- Support the ERC partners with the roll out of Community Event Based Surveillance (CEBS)
- Analyze surveillance activities in a systematic manner and report on the performance of the system
- Travel to districts to provide on-the-job mentorship to partners
- Work closely with CDC, WHO, and the MOH in each district to identify and address weakness in the system
- Conduct rapid assessments of surveillance systems for each district and ERC partner capacity; develop plans for improving surveillance systems at the distirct level
- Develop/revise training materials and conduct trainings with national and partner surveillance staff as required
REQUIREMENTS
- Master's degree in epidemiology or public health
- At least one year of experience in conducting surveillance activities for a public health agency
- Demonstrated experience, or ability to rapidly learn Ebola surveillance activities
- Experience working in a multi-cultural setting and in preference in Africa
- Previous work on surveillance in a developing country or an emergency
- Completion of a Field Epidemiology Training Program is an asset
- Ability to start immediately
HOW TO APPLY:
Please follow this link to apply: http://www.aplitrak.com/?adid=c2dyYW50Ljg1NzIwLjM4MzBAaXJjLmFwbGl0cmFrLm...
