Healthcare Facility WASH and Infection Prevention Training Course

Course overview

Healthcare facilities cannot provide safe care when water points fail, toilets are inaccessible, waste is poorly segregated, or cleaning practices are inconsistent. These gaps increase healthcare-associated infection risk, expose staff and patients to preventable hazards, interrupt clinical services, and weaken outbreak readiness. Facility managers, IPC teams, engineers, and WASH personnel need a practical way to assess these risks, prioritise improvements, and demonstrate that corrective actions are working within real budget, maintenance, and staffing constraints.

This course teaches participants to apply healthcare WASH and infection prevention methods at facility level. Participants examine water supply continuity, water-quality control, hand hygiene infrastructure, sanitation access, environmental cleaning, healthcare waste management, laundry, and vector control. They learn to use WHO WASH FIT assessment domains, conduct walk-through inspections, map contamination pathways, calculate basic service indicators, develop risk-based improvement plans, and link WASH actions to IPC programmes, antimicrobial resistance prevention, and emergency preparedness.

Instruction combines technical briefings with facility scenarios, inspection exercises, group analysis of audit findings, and structured planning workshops. Participants work with realistic data from a district hospital or primary care facility, identify priority gaps, assign responsible owners, specify indicators, and sequence actions by urgency and feasibility. Each participant leaves with a completed facility WASH and IPC improvement-plan template, an inspection checklist, a monitoring dashboard structure, and an implementation briefing that can be adapted for their own facility or programme.

The course is suited to personnel responsible for healthcare quality, infection prevention, facility operations, engineering, environmental health, or humanitarian health services. It is especially useful for teams preparing for accreditation reviews, outbreak response, rehabilitation projects, or routine WASH FIT assessments.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Conduct a structured healthcare WASH assessment using WHO WASH FIT domains and scoring criteria
• Map water, sanitation, hand hygiene, waste, and cleaning risks across patient-care areas
• Calculate basic WASH service indicators for water availability, hand hygiene coverage, sanitation functionality, and waste segregation
• Develop a risk-based corrective action plan with priorities, owners, timelines, costs, and verification measures
• Design environmental cleaning schedules and monitoring tools for high-risk clinical areas
• Specify safe healthcare waste segregation, storage, transport, treatment, and disposal controls
• Use root-cause analysis to investigate recurrent WASH and IPC failures in a healthcare facility
• Prepare a facility WASH and IPC improvement briefing for managers, partners, or inspection teams

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Infection Prevention and Control Officers — who must reduce healthcare-associated infection risks through reliable facility practices
• Hospital and Health Facility Managers — who allocate budgets and oversee service continuity, safety, and compliance
• WASH Officers and Environmental Health Practitioners — who assess water, sanitation, hygiene, and waste conditions in care settings
• Facility Engineers and Maintenance Managers — who manage water systems, sanitation infrastructure, drainage, and repair priorities
• Quality Improvement and Accreditation Staff — who need auditable evidence of WASH and IPC performance
• Humanitarian Health Programme Managers — who establish safe WASH services in supported clinics, field hospitals, and referral facilities

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course and does not require prior certification in infection prevention, engineering, or public health. Participants should be comfortable reading facility records, discussing basic clinical service workflows, and using spreadsheets for simple tables and calculations. Familiarity with terms such as hand hygiene, waste segregation, disinfectant, water point, and healthcare-associated infection is helpful but not assumed; key concepts are introduced on Day 1. A laptop with Microsoft Excel or equivalent spreadsheet software is recommended for the planning and monitoring exercises. Participants do not need laboratory water-testing experience, specialised design software, or prior experience with WHO WASH FIT.

Training methodology

The five-day programme uses instructor-led technical sessions anchored in a running healthcare-facility case. Participants inspect simulated ward, maternity, outpatient, waste-zone, and water-system conditions; review maintenance logs and cleaning records; and apply WHO WASH FIT scoring in small groups. Practical workshops cover risk mapping, indicator calculation, waste-flow analysis, and improvement-plan development. Facilitators provide feedback on each group’s findings and assumptions. On the final day, participants convert their assessment into a prioritised action plan and prepare a short management briefing for implementation at their facility.

Course outline

Day 1: Healthcare WASH, IPC and facility risk assessment

• Healthcare-associated infection pathways linked to water, sanitation, hygiene, cleaning, and waste failures
• WHO WASH FIT domains, indicators, scoring logic, and improvement-cycle process
• Facility zoning and identification of high-risk patient-care areas
• Walk-through inspection methods for wards, outpatient departments, maternity units, and laboratories
• Hand hygiene infrastructure requirements at points of care and toilets
• Water service levels, continuity, accessibility, and basic water-quality risk concepts
• Observation sampling, evidence recording, and interview questions for facility assessments

Workshop: Teams conduct a simulated WASH FIT walk-through of a district hospital and produce an evidence-based list of priority gaps.

Day 2: Safe water, sanitation and hygiene services

• Water source-to-tap mapping for healthcare facilities
• Water safety planning hazards, control measures, and operational monitoring
• Storage tank inspection, residual chlorine checks, and response to supply interruptions
• Sanitation design and accessibility requirements for patients, staff, carers, and people with disabilities
• Toilet cleaning frequencies, consumable replenishment, and functionality checks
• Hand hygiene station placement, soap or alcohol-based hand rub availability, and maintenance
• Drainage, wastewater, and flood-risk controls around clinical service areas

Workshop: Participants build a water and sanitation service map for a facility scenario and define monitoring points for each critical control.

Day 3: Environmental cleaning and healthcare waste controls

• Risk-based environmental cleaning plans for general and high-risk clinical areas
• Cleaning sequence, colour coding, equipment separation, and staff protection
• Selection and safe use of detergents, chlorine solutions, and disinfectants
• Cleaning supervision through checklists, fluorescent-marker checks, and direct observation
• Healthcare waste classification and point-of-generation segregation
• Sharps injury prevention, internal waste transport, storage, and treatment options
• Waste-flow audits and corrective controls for overflow, scavenging, and unsafe disposal

Workshop: Teams redesign a flawed cleaning and waste-management workflow, producing a revised schedule, segregation map, and control checklist.

Day 4: Monitoring, investigation and improvement planning

• Selection of SMART WASH and IPC indicators for routine facility monitoring
• Simple dashboard design using numerator, denominator, target, and trend fields
• Root-cause analysis using the five whys and fishbone diagram methods
• Incident review for water outages, sanitation failures, cleaning lapses, and waste spills
• Risk prioritisation using likelihood, consequence, and feasibility criteria
• Costed corrective action planning with responsible owners and completion dates
• Supportive supervision, verification visits, and escalation of unresolved risks

Workshop: Participants analyse a set of facility audit results, create a priority matrix, and draft a costed corrective action register.

Day 5: Implementation, resilience and management communication

• Integrating WASH actions into facility IPC committees and quality-improvement cycles
• Roles of clinical, maintenance, cleaning, procurement, and management teams
• Supply planning for soap, alcohol-based hand rub, disinfectants, bins, liners, and PPE
• Emergency WASH measures for outbreaks, floods, displacement, and utility disruptions
• Antimicrobial resistance prevention links to environmental hygiene and safe waste management
• Reporting WASH FIT findings to leadership, regulators, donors, and partner agencies
• Ninety-day implementation planning and review meeting design

Workshop: Each participant finalises a facility WASH and IPC improvement plan and delivers a short management briefing for peer and facilitator feedback.

Tools & standards covered

WHO WASH FIT, WHO IPC Core Components, Microsoft Excel, Epi Info

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions