Position Summary

The Ward Surveillance Officer is the projects on-ground presence in the ward. The role is responsible for supervising field data collection, delivering upskilling sessions to ward health staff, recruiting and orienting community sentinel volunteers, and supporting simulation drills. Ward Surveillance Officer is assigned to three wards and reports to the Surveillance Lead.

Project Background

India's rapidly urbanising cities home to over 500 million people and growing face a recurring burden of vector-borne and water-borne diseases, with dengue, malaria, cholera, and typhoid remaining endemic in informal settlements where drainage, waste management, and water supply remain inadequate. Indian cities exemplify these pressures, with seasonal disease surges recurring each year across wards and peri-urban areas. Despite sustained investment in surveillance infrastructure through the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP), and the Metropolitan Surveillance Unit (MSU) network, a persistent gap remains between data collection and public health action. Peri-urban settlements straddling municipal and district boundaries frequently fall outside the active surveillance catchment of both, and when outbreaks emerge, response teams act without a shared, evidence-based picture of where risk is concentrated.

To address this, WJCF is implementing a 10-month Health Commitment Grant titled "Strengthening the Urban Ecosystem Against Future Disease Threats" under the Tuberculosis Implementation Framework Agreement (TIFA), funded by JSI Research and Training Institute and anchored by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC),



across five high-risk cities including Ahmedabad. The project converts fragmented environmental, epidemiological, and administrative data into spatially indexed intelligence that ward officers, MSU epidemiologists, and District Surveillance Unit (DSU) teams can directly act on.

In Ahmedabad, across three priority wards, this means a Ward-Level Risk Atlas, an early warning dashboard connecting surveillance data systems with laboratory and supply chain data, targeted upskilling with measurable impact on reporting compliance, and commodity gap mapping against the 72-hour outbreak response minimum, all submitted to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and NCDC as a Surveillance-to-Action blueprint designed for replication.

Responsibilities

- Field Survey Data Collection
- Supervise enumerators conducting site surveys across three categories: waterborne risk sites, vector-borne risk sites, and surveillance network nodes, across the three ward.
- Ensure daily data submissions from enumerators are complete, GPS-tagged, and accompanied by, Videos, site photographs; flag errors to the Analyst for same-day correction.
- Accompany the drone survey vendor during aerial coverage of the ward; validate field records against drone imagery on the ground.
- Provide ward-level ground truth for the laboratory sample transport chain, identifying actual handover points, travel times, and access constraints the map alone cannot capture.

- Community Sentinel Network

- Recruit 15 sentinel volunteers per ward from existing community platforms: Mahila Arogya Samiti (MAS), Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) beneficiary groups, resident welfare associations, and frontline health workers.
- Conduct orientation

📌 Ward Surveillance Officer (Ahmedabad)
🏢 Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)
📍 Ahmedabad