Objective To investigate and analyze the past and on-going pro-poor programs related to health equity, and the relevant policies, documents, interventions measures, etc. to improve the China prisoners’ accessibility and utilization of tuberculosis (TB) control services in TB control programs, then evaluate their impacts and influences to provide evidences and suggestions for the further work of TB prevention and treatment. Methods Retrieve published documents about TB prevention and treatment of transient population dating from 1998 to 2008 from MEDLINE, PubMed, CNKI, CBMdisc CDDB and VIP with computers. Simultaneously, a series of interviews was conducted after we got the agreement of the interview people by using non-probability statistics methods. Results A total of 23 documents were retrieved, and they were consonant with the criteria, among which 8 were published and 5 were policy documents. The study on the second document showed the measures that presently applied on TB patients among prisoners in China: find patients through surveys, inspect every prisons and patients going to visit doctors with symptoms; concerning differences between various groups of prisoners, the measure of “classify and instruction, enroll together and treat” was applied; carry out health education in the prisons and so on. After the implement of various measures, the knowledge awareness, discovery rate, accomplishment ratio, cure rate and so on were all improved. The results of the qualitative interviews showed: the TB patients and the doubts among prisoners could be well gotten together and isolated to receive DOTS; doctors were able to receive trainings on TB treatment and take appointment with certificate. Conclusion According to the results of qualitative interviews, the published and the secondary documents, it could be seen that DOTS are well implemented with remarkable effects.
Objective We investigated and analyzed past and ongoing welfare programs related to health equity, and the relevant policies, documents, and interventions measures for improving China’s migrant worker population’s accessibility and utilization of tuberculosis (TB) control services in TB control programs. Then we evaluated their impactin order to provide evidence and suggestions for the further TB prevention and treatment. Methods We retrieved published documents about TB prevention and treatment of the migrant worker population dating from 1998 to 2008 from MEDLINE, PubMed, CNKI, CBMdisc CDDB, and VIP electronically. Simultaneously, a series of interviews was conducted with patients who used the programs. Results Totally, 58 documents were retrieved. Of these documents 13 passed eligibility criteria: eight have been published, five have not been published, and only one of them is RCT with B degree for quality of evidence. Secondary document research has suggested that the intervention measures that have been adopted concerning TB in China, including health promotion, providing incentive, patient tracking and supervision management. Although tuberculosis cure rates have improved, the scene interviews show that the majority of TB and suspected cases of patients don’t have enough knowledge on TB prevention and free treatment policies. It is often difficult to track the migrant population. TB detection and treatment still need to be enhanced. Conclusions There it is lack of high-quality documents about good intervention design, so it is difficult to make a objective and fair evaluation to the effects of intervention on the migrant population. In the future, we should carry out large-scale, multicenter, high-quality RCTs specifically for TB controlin the migrant population in order to provide evidencefor making a scientific and feasible intervention project.