IMPACT TB publishes key Vietnam findings

The IMPACT TB team at FIT Vietnam conducted a two-year, controlled intervention study in 12 districts of Ho Chi Minh City. They engaged community health workers as salaried employees (3 districts) or incentivized volunteers (3 districts) to conduct Active Case Finding among contacts of people with TB and urban priority groups. Eligible persons were asked to attend health services for radiographic screening and rapid molecular diagnosis or smear microscopy. Individuals diagnosed with TB were linked to appropriate care. Six districts providing routine NTP care served as control area. We evaluated additional cases notified and conducted comparative interrupted time series (ITS) analyses to assess the impact of ACF by human resource model on TB case notifications.

They verbally screened 321,020 persons in the community, of whom 70,439 were eligible for testing and
1,138 of them started TB treatment. ACF activities resulted in a + 15.9% in All Forms TB notifications in the intervention areas compared to control areas. The ITS analyses detected significant positive
post-intervention trend differences in All Forms TB notification rates between the intervention and control areas, as well as between the employee and volunteer human resource models. Therefore, we have determined that both salaried and volunteer CHW human resource models demonstrated additionality in case notifications compared to routine case finding by the government TB programme. The salaried employee CHW model achieved a greater impact on notifications and should be prioritized for scale-up, given sufficient resources.