FIT's endowment fund

by Freundeskreis fur Internationale Tuberkulosehilfe

Project Report | Oct 6, 2026
Bringing TB Screening to Where Patients Seek Care

By Ha Ngo | Communications Officer

Dear friends and supporters,

Your support for FIT’s endowment fund is an investment in keeping our TB work going beyond short grant cycles. In this report we share what one of our core activities achieved in the first half of 2026, so you can see the kind of work the endowment is designed to sustain. For transparency: this activity is funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria through the National Lung Hospital’s TB technical assistance project (2024–2026), and is implemented by our team at FIT and FIT RD.

Why this work matters

Many people with TB symptoms first visit a general hospital, a private clinic or a pharmacy rather than a TB facility. If they are not screened there, diagnosis is delayed and the disease can continue to spread. Our public–private mix activity (PPM Model 5) connects these facilities to the NTP so that patients can be screened with chest X-ray, tested with the rapid molecular GeneXpert test, and linked to treatment.

What we did

Built the network: signed 95 collaboration agreements with 67 public hospitals and clinics outside the TB programme, 17 private clinics, pharmacies and doctors, 10 GeneXpert laboratories and 1 X-ray unit, plus 304 individual contracts so that participating health workers are paid directly.
Trained health workers: 27 group sessions for 351 health workers (233 women) from 33 facilities, and 46 one-to-one sessions for 103 health workers from 44 facilities, covering TB screening, GeneXpert referral, sample transport, data reporting and treatment linkage.
Supported quality: 386 facility accounts report data weekly on the programme’s case-management system; our team made 28 supervision visits across northern, central and southern Vietnam.

Results in six months (1 January – 30 June 2026):

People screened for TB symptoms: 77,657
People with a chest X-ray result: 76,358 (98.3%)
X-ray abnormal, suggestive of TB: 9,310 (12.2%)
People with abnormal X-ray who had a sputum test: 8,593 (92.3%)
People diagnosed with TB (all forms): 2,596
Of whom bacteriologically confirmed: 2,333
People diagnosed with TB who started treatment: 2,023 (77.9%)
Additional TB patients notified by private providers: 173

In Ho Chi Minh City, private facilities contributed 595 (47.6%) of the 1,251 people diagnosed with TB, and 50 people with rifampicin-resistant TB were identified. Several facilities that had worked with us in earlier phases asked to rejoin, citing faster access to GeneXpert testing and a clear coordination and payment mechanism. At mid-year, the programme had reached 24.5% of its 2026 screening target and 40.2% of its target for people diagnosed and linked to treatment; most new provinces only began screening between April and June.

Challenges we are working through

Administrative restructuring and facility mergers slowed recruitment, and some private clinics from earlier phases have closed. Signing agreements with hospitals can take four to six weeks, and several provinces have no full-time field staff. Tracing patients who return to other provinces for treatment (about 45% of patients in Can Tho) delays confirmation of treatment start, and slower-than-planned grant disbursements delayed payments to some facilities. Gaps in core staffing and dependence on the timing of external funds are exactly the pressures a stable endowment is meant to ease.

Next steps (July – December 2026)

Focus resources on high-burden, high-volume facilities to find more people with TB and improve treatment linkage.
Carry out 31 supportive supervision visits and additional training for newly enrolled facilities.
Pilot childhood TB screening, with training under Ministry of Health Decision 162/Q-BYT at Hai Duong Children’s Hospital and Da Nang Obstetrics and Pediatrics Hospital.
Begin nutrition and vitamin support for people on TB treatment

Thank you

Every result above depends on trained health workers, working partnerships and staff who follow patients until treatment begins. Your gift to the FIT endowment fund helps ensure this capacity is not lost when a grant ends. Please consider sharing this project with friends and colleagues who care about ending TB.

With gratitude, the FIT team

Links:

Back to all project reports

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.