Strengthening Tuberculosis Control in Ukraine: Impact Evaluation Baseline Survey, Ukraine 2014

The Strengthening Tuberculosis Control in Ukraine (STbCU) project, awarded in2012 to Chemonics International in partnership with Project HOPE and the New Jersey Medical School Global Tuberculosis Institute, works to improve the health of Ukrainians by reducing the burden of tuberculosis (TB). The project focuses on strategic actions to strengthen systems for routine TB services, as well as address the challenges of diagnosis and treatment for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and TB-HIV co-infection.

In 2014, the MEASURE Evaluation project, upon the request of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Kiev, initiated an impact evaluation to study two STbCU programmatic priorities: 1) providing social support services to improve TB treatment adherence; and 2) improving integration of TB and HIV services to reduce mortality through early diagnosis and treatment for TB-HIV co-infected patients. To evaluate the impact of these program efforts, MEASURE Evaluation designed two independent but complementary studies: the Social Support study and the TB-HIV Integration study.

This report provides information on the study designs and findings at baseline from data collected in four STbCU target oblasts (Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Zaporizhzhya) and three comparison sites (Kiev City, Mykolaiv, and Zhytomyr). This baseline work shows the positive role that social support services had on health outcomes for a majority of the individuals who received services in the oblasts studied, although some of the most at-risk groups were less likely to have accessed those services. Additional analyses to control for provider referrals will improve these estimates.