Working As A Health Protection Practitioner

“A vital part of this role is to develop, co-ordinate and provide appropriate education and training to enable the delivery of a safe service… Health Protection Practitioners are not only here for IPC but also for support.”

In this article, Amira shares what it’s like to work as Health Protection Practitioner for a local council, as well as explaining who they work with and the responsibilities that come with the role.

My current role is as a Health Protection Practitioner as a part of public health, working in a local authority. This is a grade 10 role in the council and equivalent to a band 7 in the NHS. This is typically a non-clinical role in the sense that it is office based, or in some cases work from home. The hours are usually Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm.

Who Do HPPs Work With?

For this role you will need to be a Registered Nurse. You will work alongside consultants in Public Health, Nurse Consultants with knowledge of Health Protection, Emergency Planning colleagues and several partner organisations to identify all the requirements needed to ensure that the local authority meets its statutory obligations and exercises the local authority’s functions in planning for and responding to emergency situations.

This means going through workplans with consultants in Public Health for the current years and future to outline key priorities, as well as working with Emergency Planning colleagues to ensure that the local authority has plans and standard operating procedures in place for emergent situations.

For example, in the unfortunate event of another pandemic or lockdown, the Health Protection Team would carry out their action plan to ensure that residents would not be put at risk and to ensure life can go back to normal as soon as possible. This is also to ensure business continuity.

Supporting Health & Social Care Providers With IPC

One of the main purposes of this role is establishing and then supporting health and social care providers to maintain infection prevention standards. This provides the Director of Public Health and the Clinical Commissioning Group with measurable and auditable assurance in respect of this area.

As Health Protection Practitioners, we provide support to different types of health and social care settings; these range from nursing care homes to assisted living facilities. We use an audit tool to ensure that these settings are maintaining the 10 standards of infection control precautions.

The 10 Standards of Infection Control Precautions (SICPs) are:

• Patient assessment for infection risk,

• Hand hygiene,

• Respiratory and cough hygiene,

• Personal protective equipment (PPE),

• Safe management of equipment,

• Safe management of environment,

• Safe management of blood and body fluids,

• Safe management of linen,

• Safe disposal of waste (including sharps),

• Occupational safety,

• And Exposure.

After completing the audit, we can look at the areas where care settings need to improve. We then provide them an action plan which we expect to be completed and sent back within 2 weeks. Obviously not all actions can be done straight away, but as long as managers or the IPC (Infection Prevention and Control) link is aware and understands the rationale, we can leave certain actions as long-term. Overall, we ensure that care settings have IPC measures in place to protect our residents.

Providing Training To Keep Services Safe

Another vital part of this role is to develop, co-ordinate and provide appropriate education and training to enable the delivery of a safe service in line with infection prevention principles.

In my local authority we do this by carrying out training sessions where staff from health and social care settings can attend. In previous training sessions we focused on outbreak management within care homes, the 10 Standards of Infection Control Precautions, and Covid-19.

These are vital as guidance is constantly changing. Therefore, we need to clarify and educate care staff on new guidance and ensure delivery of effective infection prevention service. In these sessions care staff can also ask us for support: Health Protection Teams are not only here for IPC but also for support, whether that is with staffing or needing assistance with care plans. In the past we have also supported managers to have supportive, positive conversations about vaccinations with care staff.

You Can Specialise Within The HPP Role

Along with our main responsibilities we all also have our own workstreams. In my local authority our workstreams are:

• Immunisations,

• AMR,

• Sexual health,

• And TB.

My specific workstream is Immunisations. I look at the key priorities within the work plan for 2023/24; at the moment we are currently looking at increasing the uptake of vaccinations amongst the residents within the local authority. This includes project managing, which is great for personal development. Within this I have created a plan along with colleagues to investigate the localities and see which areas are lowest in uptake of vaccines. After looking through data, we have put together a bid to have non recurrent funding to help increase the uptake.

A vital part of this role is to develop, co-ordinate and provide appropriate education and training to enable the delivery of a safe service… Health Protection Practitioners are not only here for IPC but also for support.

Assessing Outcomes

As a Health Protection Practitioner, you will have to look at the best way to promote and be able to assess the outcomes. When putting together a bid it is vital to look at outcomes and the way you plan to measure them.

In addition to this, we have been using a roving bus to create pop up clinics for Covid-19 and flu vaccinations. This was a great was to ensure people were able to get their booster vaccinations as well to gain insight into why people were not being vaccinated.

Managing Outbreaks And Related Public Queries

Outbreak management is also a vital part of our role. Each day, one member of our team is “on-call”. The roles of the “on-call” staff member are to complete all the incidents that are logged on our incident log. On this log we get calls from health and social care settings, which includes anything from schools to care homes.

In addition to this, as we are a part of public health, sometimes we can get calls from members of the public. Often, there are a range of queries that we receive. Recently, the calls we have had have ranged from Covid-19 outbreaks in care home to schools concerned with chickenpox outbreaks.

I am aware of the fact we are all sick of hearing about Covid-19 however we are still receiving calls about outbreaks. As practitioners we must be able to manage outbreaks. For example, after receiving a call from a care home regarding a Covid-19, we would log this as an outbreak on our incident log and send out our Covid-19 letter which outlines testing for staff and residents.

In addition to this, we also provide IPC advice to manage the outbreak and to reduce the number of staff or residents affected. We will also advise to close the care home for 10 days from the last positive test. This would mean the care home is closed to admissions, discharges, transfers, and visitors. When taking the initial call, we would also get information about all the positive staff and residents so we can monitor the outbreak. This just a brief overview of our outbreak management.

Other Settings

Overall, this is a vast role which focuses on Health Protection as the job title suggests. However, as a Health Protection Practitioner you are not only working with care homes, but it is also all health and social care settings. This includes nurseries, aesthetics clinics and day centres. This also means IPC branches over to all these settings.

The main thing to ensure is that as a HPP you are here to support settings, not to act as police: some of these settings cannot accommodate certain IPC measure due to a number of reasons, such as funding or staffing issues.

Along with this we also work with colleagues from other stakeholders such as the UK Health Security Agency, Public Health England, and Clinical Commissioning Groups respectively, to ensure we all work cohesively.

I hope this article has been helpful in showing you a different role within nursing.

If you are interested in a role as a Health Protection Practitioner, you can check out our jobs page here.