Summary

HHA - REACH Ethiopia partners with the Ministry of Health in the southern region of Ethiopia to provide innovative community based case finding and treatment of TB in rural settings. The program places an emphasis on providing treatment to the vulnerable, women, and those with limited access to care.

Program goals

HHA-Reach Ethiopia aims to improve community awareness on Tuberculosis, strengthen the health system, and address public health problems at the community level.  

Key program components

HHA-Reach creates TB awareness workships at the regional, district and community levels which are attanded by political, religious, school and community leaders, stakeholders, partners, and health workers.  While some workshops are for the a non-technicial audience and focus on broad topics of advocacy, communication and social mobilization, others are designed to better prepare technical TB health workers in indentification of TB suspects, sputum collection, assessment, preparing and fixing of smears, slide transportation, recording and reporting, treatment support and follow up, and drug side effects. 

HEWs working with the program have successfuly identified “ TB suspects” (coughing for two or more weeks), conducted house-to-house visits, and counciled suspects on how to submit sputum samples for testing. HEWs record the patient's information on slides and logbooks, and arrange the transportation of the smeared slides to local health center laboratories. 

Laboratory technicians stain the collected smears using Ziehl-Neelsen and/or Auramine 0 and examin them. Patients who were found positive were registered with the National TB program and started on treatment.  Other members of the household are screened when atleast one family member is found positive, and isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT) was provided for asymptomatic children under 5 years of age.

HEWs continued to support and monitor the patients, reported drug side-effects and treatment outcomes, followed up with smear-negative cases, collected sputum samples again or referred patients to health centres/hospitals for further investigation. Regular review meetings were conducted with NTP staff, supervisors and HEWs to discuss achievements, challenges and follow-up actions.

Feedback Quarterly reports were submitted to the NTP/MOH and TB REACH for feedback. M&E activities and performance were monitored and evaluated by an independent team contracted by TB REACH and feedback was used to improve the project quality and performance