The Gastrointestinal Infections, Food safety & One Health (GIFSOH) Division is located at Colindale within UKHSAs Epidemic and Emerging Infections Directorate.

The Division's main functions constitute providing specialist (including clinical and genomic) epidemiology and surveillance for Gastrointestinal Infections (GI), coordinating the investigation of national outbreaks, advising government on the risks posed by various gastrointestinal pathogens, and responding to national and international health concerns.

The Division manages the above functions across a broad range of pathogens including enteric and food borne bacteria, viruses, and parasites. It plays an important role in Food safety and One Health and has several years' experience in using advanced techniques such as whole genome sequencing to track national and internal outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance in foodborne bacteria.

The GIFSOH Division aims to:    

• Identify and manage local and national outbreaks of gastrointestinal infections
• Provide quality assured GI pathogen surveillance outputs and foodborne outbreak investigation data
• Provide national epidemiological services for public health purposes
• Describe trends in the incidence and prevalence of gastrointestinal illness and promote public health policy recommendations
• Inform progress towards global health sector strategy on Food Safety and One Health
• Lead and contribute to research in gastrointestinal infections

Working for your organisation

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce.   

UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.  

The main responsibility of the postholder will be to contribute to the surveillance, epidemiology and investigation into outbreaks of intestinal infectious disease (IID) for GIFSOH Division at Colindale.  This will involve providing specialist administrative and technical support for a range of surveillance programmes and outbreak investigations.

The workload is extremely varied and includes:

• maintaining surveillance databases
• extracting data
• providing graphical and written summary surveillance reports to internal and external stakeholders
• supervising the collection of epidemiological data from collaborating organisations, clinicians and patients
• assisting epidemiologists in the development and introduction of new surveillance applications for the department
• providing logistical support for investigations into national outbreaks of IID
• extracting surveillance data for the preparation of scientific reports and papers for publications and providing a comprehensive secretariat function for scientific working groups and  incident management team (IMT) meetings

Main Duties and Responsibilities:

Surveillance

• Responsible for the efficient administration of gastrointestinal infections databases by ensuring timely entry of data; data validation; reconciliation; timely production of reports; troubleshooting any problems relating to departmental databases and ensuring that the reference data are kept up to date in the databases. 
• Provide technical support for electronic surveillance systems for gastrointestinal infections through design & implementation of routine data outputs.
• Write and run ad hoc queries on gastrointestinal diseases databases in response to internal and external information requests and amendments to data.
• Produce tabular and graphical outputs in electronic and paper format for distribution to collaborators and for placement within the public domain.
• Formulate data queries for answering information requests, both from within UKHSA and from outside, including Freedom of Information requests.
• Undertake regular extraction of data from SGSS for use in the production of reports etc using appropriate software.
• Contribute to the training of colleagues by providing step by step guidance on the use of gastrointestinal diseases databases on data entry, data submission, data reconciliation and running queries and to develop and maintain
• Standard Operating Procedures for the administration of gastrointestinal diseases databases.
• Assist departmental epidemiologists in the development, piloting and introduction of new surveillance systems.
• Contribute to the development of the Division's web content
• Ensure data security at all times, including during transfer between organisations.
• Adhere to the Data Protection Act and Caldicott principles in the handling and dissemination of data, including during transfer between organisations.

Outbreak Investigation
Provide administrative aspects of national outbreak investigations:

• Act as the administrative focus for gastrointestinal infection incident management teams.
• Collect and record microbiological data, demographic information and patient contact details and filing all relevant documentation collected during gastrointestinal infection outbreak investigations and ensuring that confidentiality protocols are adhered to. 
• Collect and collate data for production of reports and summaries. 

Secretariat

• Attend and provide a comprehensive secretariat function for gastrointestinal infection outbreak incident management teams by arranging meetings, minuting, transcribing Minutes, producing Agendas and Action Tables and where appropriate following-up on action points.
• Attend and provide a comprehensive secretariat function for joint UKHSA/other government departments/stakeholder meetings by minuting, transcribing Minutes, producing Agendas and Action Tables, following-up on action points and distributing to UKHSA and external colleagues.
• Attend and provide notes from weekly GI Update meeting.

Essential criteria 

• Educated to degree level in relevant science subject or equivalent level qualification or significant experience of working at a similar level in specialist area (in the maintenance, analysis of data)
• Experience in data management, handling, analysis and reporting
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Access, Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint
• Ability to produce accurate and consistent work, showing sound numeracy skills
• Ability to show good organisational, interpersonal and data presentation skills
• Ability to work well on own initiative as well as in teams to tight deadlines whilst prioritising and coordinating workload
• Ability to communicate proactively, accurately and succinctly with the ability to negotiate in a friendly and tactful manner with a wide range of health, IT and academic professionals
• Ability to deal with problems in a calm, efficient and timely manner and willingness to cross-cover roles if required
• Understanding of information governance issues including an awareness of data protection and confidentiality
• Understanding of and commitment to equality of opportunity and good working relationships

Desirable criteria 

• Experience of working in communicable disease surveillance
• Ability to provide a formal Secretariat function

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Job contact :

• Name : Gurkamal Bhambra
• Email : [email protected]

Recruitment team

• Email : [email protected]