ASPECT Trial: Att bedöma socialt skydd i Vietnam för att eliminera katastrofala kostnader in tuberkulos

Tuberculosis (TB) is a public health threat that disproportionately affects the world’s poor.

Social and economic barriers impede access to TB care, disrupt treatment adherence, and worsen treatment outcomes, resulting in avoidable deaths. The WHO’s End TB Strategy proposes the use of social protection interventions as a pillar of TB care.

How best to implement these interventions, what packages are effective and which patients to prioritize is still unknown.

The purpose of our research is to refine, evaluate, and validate a practical tool (TB-PROTECT) to support community health workers and National TB Programs to promptly identify and prioritize vulnerable TB-affected households for socioeconomic support.

We will then conduct a hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial to evaluate the acceptability, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of a socioeconomic support intervention to reduce catastrophic costs during TB care.

Our outcomes will include the proportion of TB-affected households that incur catastrophic costs, rates of successful TB treatment outcome and patients’ health-related quality of life.

Lastly, we will use principles of reciprocal learning to develop tools and guidance for the national scale-up of the TB-PROTECT tool for the identification of those at risk of catastrophic cost incurrence and mitigation of catastrophic costs through socioeconomic support in Vietnam, and to guide policy makers in future adaptations to other low- and middle-income settings.