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Purposeful Collaborative Programs to Address TB

Johnson & Johnson believes good health is the foundation of vibrant lives, thriving communities and forward progress. Over the last 70 years in India, it has improved the health and well-being of people by providing Consumer Healthcare, Medical Devices and Pharmaceuticals. Committed to supporting the Government of India in realizing its vision of a TB-free India by 2025, it has been working with the Government and other partners to take a holistic approach to eliminate TB.

Growing resistance to the most commonly used drugs compounds the public health challenge of TB, with 66,359 MDR-TB cases registered across India in 2019. Improvements in diagnosis and treatment rates are needed to help control the TB epidemic.

Intervention

With a long legacy of giving and ranked consistently among the leading corporate donors in the world, J&J has established strong partnerships with governments and local community groups to address significant health-related issues such as Tuberculosis. They have a series of programs in partnerships with several multilateral and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the Government of India.

Their programs aim to broaden appropriate access to treatment for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), improve detection of undiagnosed cases, build critical health systems capacity, and raise awareness about TB at the community level. In 2019, J&J committed to investing $500 million globally over the next four years to help end the TB and HIV epidemics.

Awareness Campaigns
Nutrition Support
J&J’s TB interventions
Case Detection and Testing
Capacity Building of Clinicians and Healthcare workers
increase access medication

Impact

Since 2016, J&J’s programs to support the Government of India’s vision to eliminate TB has had a wide-scale impact. These include:

  • The first-of-its-kind “edutainment” campaign in India – The MTV Nishedh developed by the MTV Staying Alive Foundation. To ensure inclusion of TB messaging in the campaign aimed at raising awareness and reducing stigma around health issues among young people in India The campaign cumulatively reached more than 10 million Indians via MTV India, Colors Rishtey, and VOOT.
  • Mass transit campaign – involved 24,000 auto- rickshaws, 21,000 buses, 200 taxis, 56 trains, 6 radio stations, 112 theatre screens and 590 street plays across the cities of Hyderabad, Mumbai, Nagpur, Delhi and Patna to increase community awareness on TB.
  • Partnerships with state governments and non-governmental organizations that provided over 50,000 X-ray tests, ~21,000 molecular tests and 400 ECG machines to enhance early diagnosis and initiation of appropriate treatment. Approximately 7,600 TB cases and 1,000 DR-TB cases have been diagnosed through these interventions across the states of Maharashtra, Bihar and Gujarat.
  • Training of more than 15,000 healthcare professionals across 13 high-burden states in the clinical management of TB and MDR-TB.
  • Building governments’ capacity for the introduction of bedaquiline, a drug-released specifically to treat MDR-TB patients, over 22,000 courses of Bedaquiline were donated to India through a global donation program operated in partnership with the USAID.
  • Providing nutritional support to approximately 6,000 TB and MDRTB patients across six states.

After becoming a member of the Corporate TB Pledge, in October 2019, J&J and The Union joined hands to improve the quality of Drug Resistant-TB (DR-TB) care by building programmatic/clinical capacities across seven high DR-TB burden states in India covering 247 districts. Nineteen workshops and over 350 periodic meetings to enable managing DR-TB across nodal and district DR-TB centers will be conducted. In addition, scientific material such as posters, flipbooks, flyers and videos based on the latest guidelines would be distributed among trained healthcare providers and placed at treatment centers to serve as a ready reckoner. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, initial trainings have been conducted virtually with over 1,500 healthcare professionals participating across 14 webinars between April – June 2020. These webinars have helped national experts address clinical and programmatic queries of clinicians and healthcare workers. Pre- and post-training evaluations demonstrate a significant increase in knowledge of the latest PMDT guidelines among participants.

Key Lessons

As one of the world’s largest healthcare companies, Johnson & Johnson’s deep engagement in global health innovation coupled with collaborative work with governments and strategic partners can be instrumental in impacting the TB landscape of India. Their various models of partnerships reflect a profound understanding of Tuberculosis, health systems and determinants of health as the cornerstones of successful initiatives undertaken by J&J in India.