Abstract

Tuberculosis is a disease of which notifying is mandatory in our country. The role of our dispensary in notifying and recording system was evaluated in this study. It has been found that 480 notifications were sent from health management office and 526 from health departments between 1999-2002. It has been detected that 341 (54.7%) patients were notified twice and that 42 notifications were recurrent reports due to reasons such as hemoptysis and drug side effects in a period of one year. As a result, in a four-year period, 623 notifications were recorded. The health departments were evaluated according to their number of reports; Hospital of Chest Diseases was the main institution in reporting the disease with the rate of 96.3%. It was found that 379 (60.8%) of notified cases were treated in the dispensary, but 161 (25.8%) of the reported cases were lost to follow-up. In the remaining 83 (13.3%) reports, 34 (5.4%) patients lived out of dispensary region, 23 (3.7%) patients were treated and followed in other medical centers, 7 (1.1%) patients were diagnosed as having inactive tuberculosis, while in 5 (0.8%) patients diseases other than tuberculosis were detected and 14 (2.2%) patients died due to tuberculosis. As a result, we think that there are deficiencies in notifying and recording of the patients in our region as well as a deficiency in treating and following of patients by our dispensary.