Administrative Infection Control Intervention to Improve Clinical Outcomes for Pulmonary Tuberculosis in South African Hospitals

Lessons learnt

Successes 

• Time to commencement of treatment reduced from 42 hours to less than 12 hours among DS-TB patients.
• Integration of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Model.
• Expanding access to U-LAM has improved time to effective treatment.
• Surveillance of TB among HCWs improved; hospitals have active surveillance programme.
• Monitoring of IPC activities improved; facilities reporting on IPC indicators.

Key challenges 

• Predominance of X-Ray testing vs GeneXpert testing.
• Infrastructural problem for separation. 
• Lack of dedicated data capturers, which results in late recording and reporting.