The World Health Organization (WHO) and The Union have released a training toolkit to combat childhood tuberculosis (TB). The training focuses on building the capacity of health care workers at the primary and secondary level to address and manage TB in children. The main objectives of the toolkit are to:
1 Increase detection of children with TB in the community
2 Improve the management of children with TB
3 Increase implementation of child contact screening and preventive therapy
4 Provide accurate data on childhood TB for better monitoring and evaluation.
The main target audiences for training are the national TB programme and the health workers that manage sick children and/or TB cases of any age in the community or at the more peripheral level of health care – primary health care facilities and district hospitals.
The toolkit consists of 10 modules covering a range of topics from epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment to managing childhood TB in the community.
Training Modules
Module 1: Epidemiology of childhood TB
Module 2: Diagnosis of childhood TB
Module 7: Maternal and infant TB (and HIV)
Module 8: Child TB and the integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI)