On October 24-25, a TB conference was held in Oslo, Norway, attended by representatives of National TB Programs (NTPs), Ministries of Health, academia, civil society organizations, communities, parliamentarians from Norway, Poland, Latvia, Sweden, Romania, Lithuania, Finland, Ukraine, Estonia, as well as international and regional organizations such as the TB Europe Coalition, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Regional Expert Group on Migration and Health, the Global Fund, the Stop TB Partnership and the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
TBEC was represented at the conference by its Secretariat members, Yuliia Kalancha and Vlada Rabinova, along with the TBEC Board members Stefan Radut, Daniil Kashnitsky and Cristina Enache, and the Chair of the TBEC Oversight Advisory Committee, Andrey Klepikov.
The Executive Director of TBEC co-moderated the first session of the Conference, where the WHO Regional Office for Europe and countries presented an up-to-date overview of the TB situation. In the next session, dedicated to people-centred TB care, Yuliia Kalancha presented the Standardized Package of Community-Based Support Services to Improve TB Outcomes.
As a reminder, the Standardized Package, developed jointly by TBEC, the PAS Centre and the WHO Regional Office for Europe, describes 12 essential non-medical supportive services and the methodology for their calculation. A free online course on each of these services and the methodology for their calculation was recently published on the WHO platform https://openwho.org/ .
“We are grateful to the nine countries that have adapted this Package, and we especially welcome the efforts of the five countries that have adopted it at the national level. We are confident that more countries in the region will follow this example, adapting the Package to their specific needs and legislation, adopting it as a normative document, and starting practical implementation. This will determine how services are organized, funded, and delivered, especially as countries transition from donor to state funding,” noted Yuliia Kalancha.
The second day of the conference was dedicated to reviewing the global TB situation and person-centered care, as well as discussing barriers and best practices related to treating TB among refugees and migrants in Europe, with a focus on challenges faced by refugees from Ukraine.
At the end of the event, the conference organizers — the LHL International Tuberculosis Foundation and the WHO Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Management of Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis (WHO CC) — along with the participants, developed plans to enhance future collaboration and strengthen communication between countries and organizations.
