With the increasing number of cases, the Philippines is the fourth largest contributor of TB cases worldwide after India, China, and Indonesia. Despite the country’s progress on tuberculosis treatment and care, the Philippines remains one of the highest TB burden countries and continues to bear its health and socioeconomic consequences.

Over the last two decades, PBSP has been one of the leading players in the management of TB in the Philippines, having cemented its experience and expertise in the management and implementation of the Advancing Client-centered Care and Expanding Sustainable Services for TB (or ACCESS TB) Project. This project complements the efforts of the Department of Health (DOH) in reducing the prevalence, incidence, and mortality of TB.

PBSP ensures that ACCESS TB remains inclusive and accessible to all patients.

From 2021-2022, ACCESS TB has notified 14,568 cases of Multi-drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the country and more than 14,200 have started second-line treatment for TB in the same period.

Our case-finding efforts yielded 718,930 cases in all forms, and these were detected, diagnosed, and notified in the national TB registry. Private physicians in stand-alone clinics and hospitals, and various NGO partners were able to notify 151,227 cases.

Other efforts reported 43,338 TB cases from high-risk or vulnerable populations with 8,840 notified TB cases among Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDLs) in jail facilities nationwide from 2021 to 2022.

Meanwhile, TB-HIV collaboration began Anti-RetroViral Treatment (ART) to 5,374 people living with HIV (PLHIV) and registered 247,996 individuals for new and relapse individuals with documented HIV status in various facilities nationwide. Overall, ACCESS TB successfully treated and cured 428,489 individuals out of 503,845 reported TB cases from 2021-2022.

COVID-19 RESPONSE MECHANISM

In an effort to strengthen the campaign and initiatives to end TB, The Global Fund allocated another grant to PBSP, through its COVID-19 Response Mechanism (C19RM) to support major interventions in COVID-19 control and containment along with mitigation of the effects of COVID-19 to the TB program.

C19RM rolled out digital adherence tools to ensure that TB patients comply with their scheduled treatment, supported the expansion of TB testing strategies in vaccination sites, improved the TB case-finding and transportation networks, and provided additional mobile clinic vans for TB and COVID-19 in high-burden areas across the country.

The project supported DOH by deploying two mobile van clinics to provide free chest x-ray, specimen collection and transportation, electrocardiogram (ECG), and other primary care services.

C19RM also distributed over 300,000 various medicines at the height of the pandemic and supplied over 28,600 medical equipment to various facilities across the country.