Florida department of health strengthening civil surgeons capacity for ltbi surveillance and treatment of status adjusters application - the reporting of status adjusters with ltbi offers an…

Florida department of health strengthening civil surgeons capacity for ltbi surveillance and treatment of status adjusters application - the reporting of status adjusters with ltbi offers an opportunity to assess the feasibility of scaling up a ltbi registry system, and treatment of ltbi within this population is significantly likely to reduce TB activation, prevent TB transmission, and be cost-effective. Florida is an ideal site to develop new approaches and strategies to reduce barriers civil surgeons (CS) face in adhering to the technical instructions for latent tuberculosis. With over 4.5 million non-US born (USB) individuals making up 21% of the population of florida, any increase in testing and treatment of ltbi in this high TB risk population is likely to have noticeable impact on the epidemiology of TB. This is particularly true in south florida where, as of 2019, 53.4 of miami-dade county residents (1.45 million people) were born outside of the U.S., four time higher than the national average of 13.7%. Ltbi is currently not reportable in florida, but there is a need for improved surveillance data to make a case for future surveillance and data collection to understand the burden of ltbi in a high non-USB population state. The florida civil surgeon TB consortium (fcstc) is the formalization of existing informal relationships that have existed for more than a decade between the miami-dade health department, the florida department of health TB control section, florida TB physicians' network, the southeastern national TB center (sntc) at the university of florida (UF), and borinquen health center of miami. Over the last decade, the above listed partners have collaborated on various projects directed at training the TB public health workforce, improving ltbi adherence, and refugee screening. This new more formal collaboration proposes to improve reporting and surveillance of ltbi in CS practices, use the ltbi cascade of care to establish a detailed knowledge base of ltbi among status adjusters, and use these collaborations to define the educational gaps to improve communications that promote awareness of ltbi among status adjusters and CS. The purpose of florida civil surgeon tuberculosis consortium is to identify gaps in the cascade of care at high volume CS practices; to identify and remove provider-level barriers to adherence to ltbi technical instructions for CS; and develop a strategy of interventions including training, education and case management that will increase reporting of ltbi and increase ltbi testing and treatment completion among status adjusters at CS practices. Florida aims to also pilot an electronic portal to allow for the case reporting of ltbi-positive status adjusters by CS to the state of florida for further intervention.