Abstract:
Background: Worldwide, greater than 3,500 people daily and more than 1.5 million people annually died because of Tuberculosis (TB). In 2015, TB killed 1.8 million people with 95% of cases and deaths in developing countries. The short course regimens of first-line drugs can cure around 90% of cases, if the right treatment with recommended quality of care is provided. Inappropriate TB diagnosis, treatment, and case management contribute to patients’ suffering, diagnostic delays, and continuous spread of the diseases, high health-care costs for patients and society, and development of drug resistance tuberculosis.
Objective: To assess quality of care delivered to tuberculosis patients among public hospitals in North Shoa Zone, Amhara region, Ethiopia, from 1- 30 April, 2019.
Methods: Facility based cross sectional study design was conducted. Sample size was the total TB patients who were attending TB treatment in public hospitals. Pre-test was conducted at 5% of the sample size. Trained data collectors were deployed to collect the data using facility audit and clinical observation checklists, structured questionnaires and in-depth interview for key informants. After coding the questionnaire, the data was entered into Epinfo-7 for cleaning and exported to SPSS- 20.0 for analysis. Then, descriptive statistics was computed and reported using frequencies and percentages. After performing bivariate analysis, multivariate analysis was done to establish independently associated factors at p<0.05. Data was presented using text, tables and figures. Result: The overall structural dimension (≈60%) was put on the rank of poor ranges (60-69). Very Low and no performance were found from four process indicators namely care provider gave greeting for the patient (2%), care providers demonstrated to the patient how to take medication (2%) maintaining written record of medications and bacteriologic response and adverse reactions (0%). About 53.7% of the study participants were found to be satisfied. Patients with TB symptoms were significantly associated with level of satisfaction towards TB care [AOR=0.217; 95% CI=0.064, 0.743 P=0.015].
Conclusion: The findings of this research indicated that there is poor overall structural dimension of quality of TB services being rendered to patients. Additionally, the overall level of patient satisfaction was low towards TB care. Having TB symptom during TB treatment was the only statistically significant and independently predictor of level of patient satisfaction.