My name is Doctor Ikandi, I am the chief medical officer of Omaheke Region.  Where previously the health workers didn’t know much about TB and that caused a lot of stigma and fear of working with the TB patients.  The organization that is helping us to fight the disease is called COHENA, currently it is being funded by the Global Fund.   The money to train all the health workers has gone a long way in improving the case management of patients.     
 
At the community level they have trained community leaders to mobilize communities within the region so that everybody knows what TB is and this way we are able to actually get all the suspected TB cases to health facilities when diagnosis is made.  Those ones who are identified as TB patients we bring them to the hospital at least for intensive phase and they are treated, they are given proper medication so that they can become advocates of TB in their communities where they come from and with the community DOTS all these people who have already been diagnosed TB we make contact with TB supervisors at home and these patients are able to be released from the hospital much earlier rather than staying the whole two  months intensive phase in the hospital.  Immediately they can identify a community dots supervisor at home these patients are released back to their families early enough and they ensure these patients take their treatment and get their sputum on the fifth of the month to actually find out whether or not these people have already been cured.
 
The health facilities are very far away.  Most of these patients they are not able actually to come to the hospital.  When the program started we used to have around 51 percent of cases defaulting treatment.  Our defaulter rates have gone so low they are almost actually zero at the moment.  We calculated the cure rates are around 89 percent which is beyond the set target of 85 percent by the WHO.  The case detection rate has already surpassed 70 percent and that is due to the effort that has been made not only to train the health workers but to train the community especially the community DOTS supervisors that are within the community.  This has made a big impact actually not only to the community but to the hospital.  And this has improved the services quite tremendously.