Involving private practitioners and chest physicians in the control of tuberculosis

Private practitioners including chest physicians are often an important obstacle to having a successful National Tuberculosis Programme (NTP) in low- and middle-income countries. This complicated situation has been present in most of the Latin American countries for many years.

To design an intervention model to obtain collaboration and integration of specialist physicians in the actions of the NTP.

In 1998, the IUATLD designed a special interactive model of training courses, to be held in an important number of Latin American countries. This intensive (25h in 3 days) course was named "Importance of the role of chest physicians and their integration in NTP strategies". At the end of each course, the participants were invited to sign a series of agreements concerning controversial topics that had blocked collaboration in the past.

This course, adapted to the situation of the different countries, has been held 17 times in 9 different countries. So far, nearly 600 specialist physicians have been trained with this special model, and all of them have signed important agreements on future collaboration.

There has been an important improvement in integrating these specialist physicians into the actions of the NTPs. This intervention has contributed to a substantial improvement of tuberculosis control in the last 4 years in Latin America.