Stop TB Partnership - Retooling Task Force

"We the people who bear the burden of TB disease, as members of civil society can play an important role in pushing for greater political will by creating a bottom up demand for TB new tools and partnering with our National TB Programs, the Stop TB Partnership, and the product developers to reduce barriers to the uptake of new tools."

Community/Patient representative and Community Treatment Activist

Previous experience with the introduction of new tools to prevent other communicable diseases has shown that there is often a significant delay between the availability of new tools at global level and their eventual adoption and implementation at country level.

Recognizing this important delay between evidence for and implementation of policy, the Stop TB Partnership Coordinating Board has established a Task Force on Retooling to develop a framework for catalyzing policy-makers and practitioners at global and national levels towards accelerated introduction of new tools into NTPs and national immunization programmes. One of its aims is to stimulate discussion and planning for optimal, timely and appropriate introduction, adoption and implementation of new tools as they become available.

Terms of reference Workplan 2007 List of members

Retooling Task Force

The main activities of the Retooling Task Force are:

Consolidating and sharing information from the working groups on drugs, diagnostics and vaccines on current product pipelines and timelines/milestones.
Creating opportunities for consultative dialogue with stakeholders from high TB burden countries, including ministries of health, NGOs, affected communities, etc.
Facilitating the mobilization of financial and human resources for country-level introduction and deployment.
Consolidating relevant lessons learnt form other disease areas to inform TB-specific processes for adoption, introduction and implementation.
Facilitating operational research on introduction of new tools.
Generating evidence to support the adoption of new tools.
Fast-tracking the incorporation of new tools into WHO and national policies and guidelines.
Enhancing communication among all working groups around the theme of retooling.

Future work of the Task Force on Retooling
In addition to the framework described above, the Task Force will also work with key policy-makers and stakeholders to understand and further delineate all aspects of adoption and implementation of new tools to combat TB. In the future, it expects to produce additional documents to support retooling efforts, including a stakeholder engagement plan, detailed illustrative timelines for adoption and implementation for each new tool, monitoring and evaluation indicators, and pipeline updates for medicines, diagnostics and vaccines.