National Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination Program (NTEP) of India is one of the largest public health programs in the world. It has over 30,000 peripheral health institutions providing diagnostic and treatment services in the public sector, with a huge workforce of  Medical Officers, Paramedical staff, Multi Purpose Health Workers, and other frontline health workers. Putting this together with incentivised volunteers and a huge private sector, the quantity and variety of human resources is at a scale that is unparalleled. Trained Human Resource (HR) is critical for ensuring TB patients receive quality diagnostic, treatment and other patient support services.

The program has considerably expanded in the last five years into many new technical areas such as Direct Benefit Transfers and TB Preventive Therapy. There has been a corresponding increase in the amount training is needed. These areas are continuously evolving, with very frequent updates and changes. As a result of this there is a regular need for training, to rapidly disseminate changes and additions in program operations. The current training system primarily consists of 9 printed modules which are delivered in a modular reading fashion; updates over and above these modules are disseminated using guidelines/ other documents. In addition a variety of training material is also created by a multitude of development partners operating in different geographies in specific thematic areas. This material is used for training in the form of formal training, orientation workshops and sensitization meetings. The training status of core NTEP staff is monitored using aggregate reports collected manually from the TU level.

There is a felt need to better organize, increase the pace and efficiency at which program evolution is communicated to the field in the form of training. This revision of the training system should:

  1. Upgrade the current paper based training material to use a combination of electronic multimedia, organizing efforts of many stakeholders into one uniform system of content development.
  2. Use modern methods of knowledge and skills transfer including e-learning and adult learning principles. This would also need to leverage the increased acceptance to electronic modes of training, a change brought about by the COVID19 pandemic.
  3. Have a low effort monitoring system that can be applied across the country.

With these needs in mind NTEP had decided to revise and modernize its training system. The subsequent sections discuss the various components of the system and the various standard processes and guidelines related to them.