1. Tell us about your experience putting together your portfolio for the AL-CIP?
Creating this AL-CIP portfolio has been an insightful journey that allowed me to reflect on my professional growth as an infection prevention and control (IPC) leader. It provided an opportunity to translate years of practical experience, crisis management, and system-building into structured documentation that highlights how evidence-based IPC practices can protect patients, empower staff, and strengthen healthcare resilience.
Throughout this process, I revisited multiple projects that defined different phases of my career right from antimicrobial stewardship, hand hygiene practices and HAI surveillance to outbreak containment, COVID-19 crisis management, and occupational health strengthening. Each project reflected not just an initiative but a story of collaboration, innovation, and leadership under complex healthcare challenges.
2. Can you provide tips for writing a successful rationale?
Choose one or two projects that best demonstrate that skill.Define your role, actions, and outcomes not just what the team did. Portfolio should blend narration with data either qualitative or quantitative.
IPC is multidisciplinary so it depends on collaboration, not just compliance.
End every portfolio with a reflective paragraph like what did this experience teach me as a leader?
Cover all aspects of IPC.
Before final submission, ask a trusted colleague or a leader in IPC to review your draft. To clarify Does it clearly show leadership? Does it feel engaging and professional?
3. What advice would you give to someone considering the AL-CIP?
Use your own narrative which is a meaningful experience proud but humble, confident but reflective.
Include challenges you faced (resource gaps, resistance to change) and how you overcame them.
4. What does earning your AL-CIP mean to you?
Earning the Advanced Leadership Certificate in Infection Prevention and Control is both humbling and inspiring. This journey allowed me to pause, reflect, and consolidate my years of hands on experience into structured leadership practice. The process deepened my understanding that effective IPC is not only about protocols and compliance, but about involvement of people, community, culture, and continuous learning.
This recognition reaffirms my commitment to advancing patient and healthcare worker safety. I am deeply grateful to my mentors, colleagues, and teams who stood by every challenge.This recognition belongs to everyone who believes that infection prevention is not a department, but a culture.