STLS

Pharmacovigilance is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other drug-related problem.

• It is a fundamental public health surveillance activity to ensure patient safety measures in healthcare.
• Good pharmacovigilance will identify the risks within the shortest possible time after medicines have been marketed and help establish or identify risk factors.

Importance of Pharmacovigilance

TB patients may not stay in one place throughout the treatment duration. When they move from one place to other, there should be a mechanism to hand over the responsibility of continuing the patient's treatment in a facility near the new place of the patient. This is the concept of patient transfer and can be easily managed in Nikshay portal.

In the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP), the ‘NTEP TB identity card’ is provided for their identification and record of clinical follow-ups.

The identity card is completed for each patient who has a Tuberculosis (TB) Treatment Card, and it is kept with the patient. Information from the TB Treatment Card is used to complete the identity card.

There are 3 parts in the NTEP TB identity card and details in each part is delineated in Table 1.

The Tuberculosis Treatment Card is a paper-based recording form that is kept in the institution treating the TB patient under the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP). It is a pre-requisite documentation related to treatment services offered to TB patients under NTEP.

Uses of the TB Treatment Card

The TB treatment card is primarily used for:

It is extremely important for any type of TB patient to be initiated on the right treatment at the earliest in order to have better treatment outcomes. Therefore as soon as the patient is diagnosed, s/he should immediately be traced with the help of the Community Health Officer (CHO) of the Health and Wellness Centres (HWC), TB Health Visitors (TBHV) / Senior Treatment Supervisor(STS) and the health facility doctors and initiated on the appropriate treatment regimen.

Steps in TB Treatment Initiation

Tuberculosis treatment and its different regimens have scientific backgrounds for their formulations. To understand this, we need to know about the mode of action of each anti-TB drug first.

Mode of Action of Anti-TB Drugs

Anti-TB drugs have the following three actions:

Under the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP), strategies adopted in the treatment of TB are based on the available scientific and operational researches. These strategies are combined to ensure better treatment outcomes for the TB patients. The main strategies include:

Domiciliary Treatment

The goals of tuberculosis treatment are:

• Rendering the patient non-infectious, breaking the chain of transmission and decreasing the infection​ pool

• Decreasing case fatality and morbidity by ensuring relapse-free cure

• Minimising and preventing the development of drug resistance.  ​

To meet the goals of treatment, the regimens should be:

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