Gaps in Infection Prevention and Control in public health facilities of Sierra Leone after the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak

The IPC/WASH checklist (2015 version) is a structured, closed-ended questionnaire with a scoring system on 10 thematic areas or components. The 10 thematic areas include: 1) availability of screening and isolation facilities, 2) IPC/WASH organization, 3) hand hygiene, 4) personal protective equipment and supplies, 5) sharps safety, 6) decontamination of medical equipment, 7) decontamination of linen, 8) decontamination of the environment, 9) waste management and 10) sanitation. Each thematic area has sub-component questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response and coded as 1 or 0, respectively. The checklist has a total of 68 questions for hospital assessment and 64 questions for PHU assessment. For each thematic area, the total number of ‘yes’ responses are added and divided by the total number of questions for that section. This is multiplied by 100 to get the percentage score. An overall score is computed for each thematic area and based on the percentage scores, compliance is graded as: i) compliant: 85% or above (GREEN); ii) partial compliance: 70 to 84% (AMBER) and; iii) minimal compliance: below 70% (RED)