Place of Service: MENTOR Garissa, Kenya (including other locations in agreement with the Country Director/Programme Director).
Duration: 1 year
The MENTOR Initiative (MENTOR) is a “not for profit”, charitable, non-governmental organisation devoted to reducing death and suffering from malaria in humanitarian crises. The MENTOR Initiative is currently providing ongoing emergency support to the most vulnerable communities in Liberia, Angola, Kenya, Somalia, the Central African Republic, Southern Chad and South Sudan.
Reporting To: • Administratively/operationally to Programme Director/ Country Director. • Technical Line Management from the Programme Manager at HQ.
In-Charge/Managing: • All the Comic Relief Special initiative Clinical staff plus other staff who will be utilised in research when it takes place.
Horizontal Relations: Peer Colleagues • Finance Coordinator, M & E Coordinator, Clinical Training Officer, Logistics Officer, and Community Based Malaria Control Coordinator among other staff within KENYA operation.
Essential Qualification and Experience • Master’s degree in Public Health or equivalent preferably with a basic medical training. • Either proven experience in developing and implementing high quality operational research in malaria or community health including team management experience • Or Health Programme management including some operational research experience for a minimum 5 years. • Training in biostatics including use of computer software including either STATA, Epi Info and SPSS statistical application • Solid understanding about malaria epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment
Competencies • Excellent Computer skills and report writing skills. • Excellent research writing skills with prove of atleast 5 published work. • Excellent team work and communication skills.
Overall Scope of Services:
The Clinical Support and Research Coordinator services are required to assist The MENTOR Initiative in the overall implementation of the project in general, and specifically in the provision of effective planning, coordination and implementation of malaria surveillance, case management and operational research activities at health service level, in partnership with affected communities, the Ministry of Health District and Provincial Health Teams, Division of Malaria Control, international and national malaria control and research partners. S/he will assist the Programme in team building and management, operational research, build high quality case management capacity and establish effective early malaria detection and supply chain management systems, reporting and information dissemination. S/he will be entrusted with the critical task of ensuring the programme achieves its objectives in terms of all Clinical and Research activities in accordance with the Programme grant/award and The MENTOR Initiative guidance/guidelines.
On Research, S/he will be required to assist The MENTOR Initiative in the technical development of operational research, and in the provision of technical advisory services to support Comic Relief SI staff and Emergency Programme.
The Clinical Support and Research Coordinator will support the Programme Director/Country Director in the various tasks set forth:
1.0. Clinical Technical roles 1.1. Team Building and Management • Manage a team of clinical officers in collaboration with the Programme Director/Country Director including recruitment, team building, activity management and technical support. • Work with the Garissa technical and operational teams to provide timely financial and operational plans for all proposed activities. • With support from the Finance Coordinator, be responsible for the financial planning, budgeting, budget allocation and liquidation of all activity funds. • Be conversant and implement accurately in all MENTOR team Internal Rules and Regulations, logistics and finance procedures.
1.2. Technical • Coordinate and collaborate with the district and Provincial teams of the Ministry of Health, to jointly plan and agree priorities for SI activities on a monthly basis. Build the capacity of the MoH counterparts in Garissa, to reinforce their technical planning and delivery capacity. • In collaboration with the M&E Coordinator review existing and local guidelines, job aids and other materials and select the most useful of these for use in technical capacity building activities. • Continue to monitor against baseline data, and implement assessments of the current level of health worker practices in rural and town based facilities, and DANIDA funded MoH mobile clinics, in relation to differential diagnostic services, confirmatory malaria diagnosis (with RDTs) and malaria case management of uncomplicated and severe cases, using standardised MENTOR monitoring/coaching templates . • Provide monthly technical reporting updates to the Programme Director and other external partners as required.
1.3. Building High Quality Malaria Case Management Capacity: • Work with the MoH District Heath Teams to ensure joint planning and delivery of technical training of district health workers for differential disease diagnosis, confirmatory malaria diagnosis and case management of uncomplicated and severe malaria cases. • Identify and monitor health workers in need of technical malaria training. • Establish and ensure the management of, as well as active participation in regular, joint on the job training technical coaching of health workers at facility level and standardized supervision and monitoring of health services indicators for malaria case management. • Champion the use of, and encourage and monitor on a regular basis the uptake and utilisation of RDTs by health workers. • Improve the capacity of health facility teams to effectively identify record and report patient symptoms and confirmed malaria and non malaria cases through existing epidemiological surveillance systems. • Reinforce the capacity of heath facility teams to manage and record malaria commodity consumption rates and needs and reinforce reporting chain for supply chain needs through to regional and national partners in coordination with the Programme Director/Country Director. • Ensure commodity data from health facilities is shared with DMTs, PMTs and KEMSA. • Manage programme contingency supply chains to health facilities for malaria commodities in co-ordination with the DHT to minimize stock outs.
1.4. Establishing effective early detection systems for malaria epidemics and reinforced supply chains. • Train health workers from each sentinel site in the use of ARGOS satellite early warning information systems. • Conduct regular technical coaching visits to sentinel sites to ensure correct and regular utilization of ARGOS. • Provide technical training and support to the DHMT epidemiological officer to utilize the ARGOS web analysis of weekly data to identify early indications of epidemics, and minimise malaria commodity stock outs. • Ensure that KEMSA (National drug supply) DoMC counterparts, and any other interested parties are also trained and supported in the regular use of the ARGOS web reporting and analysis in order to strengthen weekly monitoring of sentinel site reports. • Compare and monitor operational and cost advantages and disadvantages between the ARGOS early warning system, existing paper driven early warning systems and mobile phone based early warning systems. • Ensure strong co-ordination between all users of the ARGOS system (local, provincial and national) to ensure maximum benefits are achieved.
2.0. Operation Research Tasks 2.1. MENTOR Representations: • Liaison and representation of MENTOR with the WELCOME Trust KEMRI, and other academic partners, to discuss planning and development of complimentary malaria surveys and data collection activities. • As required represent the organisation with donors and key partners regarding the operational research portfolio under the SI.
2.2. Technical Team Capacity building: Working in close co-ordination with the Garissa based programme coordinators: • Provide technical advice where needed in the in-house training and development of national technical staff to ensure that they have the specific entomological or operational research skills and capacity to fulfil their individual role in operational research implementation. • Support, and attend if possible, monthly internal technical planning and co-ordination meetings in Garissa • Work with the M&E Co-ordinator to train and support the Data Base Manager to establish an effective data base for the collection and analysis if various data sets that will be routinely gathered through this programme.
2.3. Ongoing technical responsibilities and activities: • Work with the M& E Coordinator to analyse existing malaria data for Garissa, including any recent survey data, and provide technical advice for the ongoing malaria prevalence surveillance. • Work with CBMC and M&E Coordinator to design and analyse focus group planning sessions to consult communities in Garissa on malaria, prevention understanding and activities involvement. • Work with Garissa team in the development of monitoring templates and evaluation tools/surveys to measure community LLIN usage and durability, IRS acceptability and impact on malaria, and impacts of IEC. • Work with the M&E coordinator to facilitate associated academic partner relationships and co-ordination, through joint protocol development, data analysis and the dissemination of results. • Advice and support on the correct technical implementation of the ACT Adherence study, Pf Pv study and malaria prevalence study using rigorous operational research approaches to provide robust and comparable data.
• Work closely with the Garissa based team to formulate and develop new and appropriate research questions and the subsequent development of research protocols and operational research implementation. • As required provide technical support to short term researchers as they carry out research in partnership with MENTOR. • Oversee and drive forward ethical approval process as required for SI study protocols in conjunction with the programme technical co-ordinators. • Support the Clinical Officers to monitor the utilisation of ARGOS and interpretation of data from ARGOS and comparisons with other surveillance tools such as HMIS and SMS for Life. This will also entail weekly feedback and reporting.
3.0. REPORTING • S/he will be required to submit a summary report of activities carried out on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis including ARGOS software data analysis and presentation. The weekly report shall include identification of areas of weakness and strengths and recommendation for improvement in implementation and performance of the related tasks. • S/he will also be required to submit various reports for the Programme - quarterly, half-yearly (if required), yearly and Final report detailing the overall accomplishments, challenges and analysis of the ways in which the organisation may best achieve ongoing objectives in relation to the programme. • On a weekly basis give feedback on the Progress of all ORs that are ongoing or under development.
Send a CV and letter of motivation to recruitment@mentor-initiative.net No CV only application will be considered
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