WHO Infection Prevention and Control Health Facility Rapid Assessment Tool for Ebola and Marburg Diseases: a validation mixed-method study

Introduction/Objectives: The global population continually faces pathogenic threats from multiple outbreaks annually. These outbreaks may challenge healthcare facilities’ (HF) capacity to provide care while maintaining patients’ and health workers’ safety. Effective infection prevention and control measures are the cornerstone to mitigating and controlling public health events. This study validates the World Health Organization (WHO) IPC health facility rapid assessment tool (RAT) designed for evaluating health facility IPC preparedness and response during Orthoebolavirus disease (EBOD) or Orthomarburgvirus disease (MARD) outbreaks. Methods: This operational research study used a mixed method, combining a prospective evaluation of inter-rater reliability assessment of HF and FGD of assessors. Three assessors applied RAT independently in 51 health facilities in Uganda during the 2022 Sudan virus outbreak. Results: The tool proved feasible to administer, with a median completion time of 62 minutes per facility. The IPC RAT exhibited good internal consistency and inter-rater reliability, with an average Fleiss’ Kappa of 0.4 across the 15 components, suggesting a moderate-to-high consistency among assessors. Recommendations for improving the tool included revising some items for clarity and relevance, adding items to cover additional IPC aspects, developing a user guide and training materials, enhancing the scoring system, data visualization, and analysis dashboard. Conclusion: The IPC EBOD-RAT is a reliable tool for rapidly assessing IPC in HF, during EBOD/MARD outbreaks. This study highlights the need to further refine the tool in various settings and contexts, and to develop user guidance and training materials.