FeedbackEngaging health care providers within the private sector aims to improve access to TB care and treatment for people who prefer to seek care within the private setting, including children and adolescents (174).
This approach may save patients money by facilitating referral to free NTP services or enabling privately managed patients to benefit from programme-procured medicines, diagnostics and social support. Engaging private health care providers has the advantage of relieving the NTP of some roles and responsibilities in TB care and treatment, such as awareness creation, TB prevention, systematic TB screening, diagnosis, treatment initiation and follow-up, TB transmission due to diagnosis and treatment delays, mortality and morbidity due to inappropriate treatment, drug resistance due to incomplete treatment, catastrophic costs due to out-of-pocket expenditure, and incomplete monitoring and evaluation of TB services. Furthermore, it can address challenges around delayed and incomplete introduction of improved TB tools and commodities, including FDCs, as a result of failure to penetrate private channels (174).