Tuberculosis (TB)
Every year, 10 million people fall ill with tuberculosis (TB). Despite being a preventable and curable disease, 1.5 million people die from TB each year – making it the world’s top infectious killer (WHO). TB is present in all countries and age groups. In 2015, the largest number of new TB cases occurred in Asia, with 61% of new cases, followed by Africa, with 26% of new cases (WHO). Community health programs can support in creating community awareness on TB, active case finding through community screening, linking them to care, accompanying them to clinic appointments, supporting patients throughout treatment until cure and defaulter tracing.
The TB workflow seeks to enhance earlier referral to prevention, care, treatment and support for persons newly identified as being TB positive.This will help in reduction of TB related deaths. CHWs can help to enhance the timely reach, uptake and quality of TB services.
The CHT application supports community health workers and clinical staff by:
- Guiding screening of TB symptoms
- Referring eligible persons to the sputum testing points for TB testing
- Ensuring on-time follow up of persons on TB treatment programs for adherence counselling
- TB Contact Tracing
- Facilitating side effects and danger signs screening for person on TB treatment
- Defaulter tracing of those already in TB treatment
- CHWs are reminded to screen all persons over 5 years for TB symptoms
- Link the CHWs and SCHWs to ensure all suspected cases submit sputum
- SCHWs to report all TB sputum samples collected and submitted to facilities
- SS to input TB results from facility while CHWs and SCHWs get tasks whenever results are submitted
- SS notifies CHWs whenever TB results are out
- CHWs tasked to ensure all exposed members are screened
- Dashboards to monitor TB related activities and outcomes
- CHWs actively screen community members for TB
- CHWs refer and accompany all suspected TB cases
- Sputum Collection done from the community
- All identified TB patients are followed up to enroll for treatment
- Community members exposed to TB are screened
- All TB cases are identified
- Patients Adhere to treatment
- Patients not adhering to treatment are identified and followed up by the community
- All exposed children are started on treatment
- Facilities have sufficient equipment and supplies for TB treatment
- CHWs are trained well on TB screening
- CHWs have good working relationship with the community
Reduce the incidence of TB in the community
Once a hierarchy of people and places is established, forms are added at different levels. This diagram indicates the forms that can be filled about a person in the app (in this case, family members at the household level), as well as the person/user who will access these forms and make the reports (CHWs at the CHW Area level). Some forms are accessible as actions from the family member’s profile as actions, others from the CHW’s task list as tasks, and some as either.
Tuberculosis workflows are defined to connect form actions and data with people. Detailed documentation for these forms and task schedules are linked from the workflow diagrams below. Accompanying this documentation are tips and insights into the design decisions made along the way, and suggestions for how and where to customize the forms.
