Grant: Team Grant: Pathways IRT - Component 2 - Tuberculosis

Among Indigenous Peoples in the Prairie Provinces TB occurs in focal pockets of incidence, such that most communities have little to no TB while a few others are very high-incidence. High incidence communities tend to be clustered together and are bound both by their geographic proximity and through kinship to members of other nearby communities. We believe that eliminating TB in these regional clusters is additionally complicated given that TB programming and the provision of services is defined by jurisdictional and geographical borders that do not reflect the mobility and realities of the people who live there. In other words, these jurisdictional borders and the resultant delineation of services tend not to be based on the realities of the people to whom TB programming is meant to relate. As such, in Component I we proposed the development of a cross-border, regional coalition to advocate for better population and community health supports that would have the downstream effect of reducing TB transmission and progression to disease. TB elimination cannot be met in isolation, but instead requires that interests of the region at large and the people living therein be considered and promoted. In Component II, this regional committee would support the implementation of two locally specific TB elimination strategies across diverse, yet interconnected, communities. Our team has identified two interrelated strategies that we will implement and evaluate in component II. These two TB elimination strategies are: 1) improved, regional, surveillance and translation of those surveillance data back to relevant community members, and 2) an expanded program of outreach that has as its primary focus "wellness".