Treatment Outcomes of Tuberculosis Patients at Debre Berhan Hospital, Amhara Region, Northern Ethiopia

BACKGROUND: Directly observed treatment remains one of the most widely-accepted global health interventions for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis treatment outcome is one of the performance indicators of the programme set by World Health Organization. Therefore, evaluating the treatment success rate of Debre Berhan Hospital was mandatory to show the achievement and to indicate where the hospital is against the World Health Organization target. METHODS: A register based cross sectional study covering the period of January 2009 to December 2013 was employed. All clients with complete records of the treatment outcome were included in the study. A checklist was prepared to extract data from patient charts. Data were entered into Epi-info version 3.2.2andanalyzed using SPSS version 16 for windows. RESULTS: Between January 2009 and December 2013, a total of 1280 tuberculosis cases that had complete records on treatment outcome were included in the analysis. Four in five (79.4%) of the patients had favorable treatment outcome; 15.8% were cured and 63.5%completed their treatment. There was a continuous increment of treatment success rate from 2010 to 2013 in the area and the treatment success rate in the year 2013 was 84.4%. CONCLUSION: Despite the recent improvements in treatment success rate, treatment completed and defaulting rate, further efforts should be made by responsible bodies to identify and improve possible promoting factors for successful tuberculosis treatment outcome.