CII signs MoU with MOHFW on catalysing private sector on TB-free workplaces campaign

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Central TB Division, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on catalysing the private sector in a pan-India movement on TB-free workplaces. It is a three-year long campaign that involves multiple stakeholders engaged across awareness and sensitisation, screening and treatment. CII, through this campaign, will push the mandate of a TB-free workplace among its corporate membership spanning across all states in India. As part of this campaign, CII will aggregate various initiatives, innovations and linkages necessary to give a fillip to the national mandate of reducing TB prevalence significantly by 2025.

The scope under this MoU includes awareness building/sensitization of Indian industry – it will include awareness building for a diverse cohort that includes employees, employers and medical practitioners and other specialists involved in managing and caring for TB; screening – CII will develop public-private partnership (PPP) models that address challenges related to local infrastructure and finances and provide referral linkages that can enable timely screening as well as treatments and treatment – these will include activities that focus more on strategic use of existing workforce, MRs, available at pharmaceutical companies to bridge the gap between standard treatment guidelines by the Government of India and the World Health Organization (WHO) and private practitioners who are major stakeholders in treating a large pool of patients.

Both parties shall appoint nodal officers for steering the collaboration activities and they will have joint discretion to modify, amend or expand the scope of collaboration, and planning and implementation of intended activities.

CII will be organising a mini walkathon which will announce several launches and a formal ‘Call to Action’ to catalyse the private sector on 22^nd, March, 2020 in the run up to the national celebrations on 24th March, 2020 in conjunction with the World TB Day.