Health Emergency Preparedness and Response
About Health Emergency Preparedness and Response
The Directorate of Emergency Preparedness and Response is responsible for the mitigation of disasters and emergencies and management of its impact. The Team also leads or supports outbreak response activities including the deployment of Rapid Response Teams. In addition to this, the Directorate builds capacity, advocates and sensitises on emergency preparedness and response. During the 2016/2017 Meningitis outbreak, the Directorate led the establishment of an Emergency Operations Centre located at the Headquarters. The EOC is responsible for coordination of outbreak response activities in the country. The Directorate has also supported the rebuilding of the surveillance system and supported the response to disease outbreaks in the North-East of Nigeria.
Head of Department
John Oladejo
Director, Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Department Dr. John Oladejo currently serves as Director, Health Emergency Preparedness and Response of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) and was recently appointed as National Incident Manager (IM) for COVID19 Response. Dr. John Oladejo holds a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science degrees (MSc) Chemistry of the University of Lagos, Bachelor of Medicine; Bachelor of Surgery (MBCh.B) of the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye; Master of Public Health (MPH) of the University of Maastricht, the Netherland. He is a Fellow of the Public Health Emergency Management (FPHEM) of the Prestigious US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC), Fellow of the Institute of Credit Administration (FICA) Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants (FCMC). He also attended numerous short courses in pure and applied epidemiology, both home and abroad and has some publications to his credit apart from numerous presentations in international conferences and seminar. He is presently working on his Ph.D. thesis in Public Health of the Central University of Nicaragua. He was appointed as Incident Manager (IM) of the Incidence Management System (IMS) during the large outbreak of Cerebrospinal Meningitis (CSM) of 2016/2017, responsible for leading National CSM EOC with remarkable achievement in drastic reduction in the number of new cases from over 2500 new cases per week to 300 new cases per week and within three weeks the outbreak was declared over. He also led IMS team during the 2018 Yellow Fever Outbreak, which was severe with large scale in Edo State. He led several teams to Borno States for humanitarian responses at the peak of insurgency in 2016. He conducted several training for health workers in the State and represented NCDC on a committee on Nutrition and Health Emergency and Humanitarian Response. Prior to this, he worked as Medical Epidemiologist leading several outbreak Rapid Response Team (RRT) to states for managing outbreak of infectious diseases such as Lassa Fever, Cholera, Cerebrospinal Meningitis, Measles and Yellow Fever and was actively involved in the containment of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak which occurred in 2014. He also served as AOR in a cooperative agreement between US CDC and Federal Ministry of Health; this led to release of funds for procuring equipment at National Reference Laboratory in Gaduwa, Abuja that is now the hub for managing samples during outbreak and serve as repository for specimen.
