IHI partners with health department in South Africa

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has been awarded a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support a four-year quality improvement (QI) initiative to reduce deaths from tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa.

The initiative has been co-designed with the South Africa National Department of Health (NDoH) and other partners, and will be the first country-wide TB effort of its kind to utilize QI methodologies at both local and national levels. The goals are to find the missing TB cases, dramatically improve the care of patients with TB, reduce the incidence of the disease by nearly a third by 2022, and cut the rate of TB mortality in half by the same year.

The main challenge faced by the NDoH is the high level of attrition among patients from screening to diagnosis, treatment initiation, and completion, known as the TB Care Cascade. The NDoH has prioritized strengthening the TB Care Cascade to reduce the number of patients who fall out of the process along the cascade. Quality improvement methodology will be used to identify the gaps, develop and monitor plans to address them at facility level.