Continuum of TB Care

What is the "continuum of TB Care"?

Tuberculosis in contrast to other infectious diseases affects humans over a long period of time. Stages such as uninfected, infected, and disease, do not have clearly demarcated time points and stages blend with each other when a person is converting or transitioning from one to the other. In addition, a person cured from TB may get re-infected and diseased, or still harbor a few dormant TB bacteria which may get reactivated at some future time; this too needs to be cared for. Hence, TB care is visualized as a continuous spectrum of care, with parts that requires varying type and intensity of services throughout a person's lifecycle, called the continuum of care.      

Continuum of TB care is a concept that emphasizes that care provision/ TB related health care services exists is in a continuum for an individual's lifetime. It includes services before and after the current episode of TB including vulnerable population, TB infection, post treatment follow-up and recurrence of TB. 

NOTE:

1. When interacting with a person it is important to locate the person in this continuum of care. This is done by a combination of screening for TB disease, testing for TB infection, asking for the previous history of TB/ checking for existing records in Nikshay using patient identifiers.
2. In alignment with the continuum of care concept, Nikshay follows a lifecycle approach. It is able to document and track a patient throughout the continuum using any of the Patient ID or Episode ID or any of the service identifiers(Test ID, Transfer ID etc). 

Resources

1. Guidelines for Programmatic Management of Tuberculosis Preventive Treatment in India.
2. Standards for TB Care in India.

Assessment