Symposium 3

Abstract:
One of the three major targets of WHO’s End TB Strategy is to alleviate the economic burden: no TB patient or their household should face catastrophic costs due to TB. The WHO Global TB Programme established a standardized protocol to provide programmatic guidance on the design, implementation, and analysis of national patient cost surveys. To date, national TB patient cost surveys have been mostly conducted in high burden countries, and no survey has been conducted in high-income countries. The presentation will start with an overview of the findings from previous national surveys, with a focus on countries from the Asia Pacific region. I will then introduce the design and findings from the national TB patient cost survey in Taiwan, a high-income country where the national health insurance has been providing full coverage for TB-related medical care for over two decades. We found that even in a high-income setting with universal health coverage that fully covered the costs of direct medical care for TB patients, costs of TB-related care remained an economic threat to a substantial proportion of TB-affected households, especially for those with MDR-TB. The implication of these results on the progress toward ending TB will be discussed.