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Prabin Shrestha, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at HERD shares his experience of facilitating TB Modular Training at Lalitpur District

As per the request from District Public Health Office (DPHO) Lalitpur to facilitate the TB modular training, I participated in the training as a facilitator. The training was held from 27-29 March 2016 and the training venue was Nutritional Rehabilitation Home (NRH), Sunakothi. There were 17 participants (health workers) from 15 different health centres including both private and public health institutions.

The main objectives of the modular training was to provide new health workers with knowledge and information about National Tuberculosis Programme (NTP) , its activities and policies, identification of TB suspects, registration of patients, diagnosis and treatment management along with monitoring and supervision and proper recording and reporting of cases. Different methodologies were used throughout the training such as PowerPoint presentation, Group Discussion, Lecture, Case Study, Question Answer sessions. This training was based on the new edition (13^th edition) of training manual of NTP and was provided to new health workers who had not received any training on TB. Likewise, health workers from some private health institutions who were in the process of establishing DOTS in their institutions were present in the training. Thus, it was a good opportunity to share our experiences working on TB to the participants.

I was involved in facilitation of the session of use of Gene Xpert for TB diagnosis. During this session, I talked about the importance of Gene Xpert for TB diagnosis, Specimen collection for Gene Xpert, use of Gene Xpert in Nepal, availability of Gene Xpert services in Nepal and algorithms for conducting Gene Xpert tests as per NTP guidelines. Apart from this, I also talked about the TB REACH project of HERD, its modalities and achievements. I was also engaged in pre-test and post-test of the training, various group discussions, case studies and question answer sessions.

Overall, I found the training to be effective in the ground that this training was able to fulfill the objectives to provide knowledge to the participants on NTP activities, policy, diagnosis and management of patients and doing proper recording and reporting. There was active participation from all the trainees as well as the facilitators. I also observed that the duration of the modular training (3 days) was not sufficient to cover all the topics as per the schedule. Furthermore, it would have been better to include some practical classes and field visit in the schedule to have a real situation and learn even better.