2.6.2 The second week of the course
During the second week, participants worked on the training modules at two different levels: 12 of the participants chose the Managing Tuberculosis at National level modules (2 groups) while 14 others worked on the Managing Tuberculosis at District Level modules (3 groups).
Each of the groups worked with a facilitator, throughout the day. Facilitators were moved to a different group every day to give everybody a chance to get to know each of the facilitators better.
2.6.3 Field visit
On 1st November, the participants traveled to Shijiazhang City, Hebei province for a four-day visit. They were given an overview of the tuberculosis situation in the province and in the city. On the two following days, they were divided into four groups to visit two different counties each. The first day, they familiarized themselves with the health structure in the county, down to township and village levels. On the second day, they focused more on one county, to examine any of the features they wished: facilities, staff, laboratory or registers. On the last day, they prepared and presented a work on a topic of their choice, in relation with the field visit.
2.6.4 The third week of the course
Upon return to Beijing, the participants started preparing group action plans. Each of the groups selected a specific topic of discussion from the tuberculosis situation in a country represented in the group. The objectives of the five group action plans are summarized as follows:
1st group: Action plan to establish a revised NTP strategy in Zavkhan, Mongolia.
2nd group: Advocacy in the Philippines.
3rd group: How to increase the detection rate in Jiang Su province, China.
4th group: How to improve the cure rate for treatment in a district hospital, Vientiane Municipality, the Lao People's Democratic Republic.
5th group: DOTS in Port-Moresby, Papua New Guinea
One of the last activities of the course was an exercise in cohort analysis from documents prepared by the Ministry of Health, China.
2.7 Closing ceremony
The closing ceremony took place on 7 November, at the Sino-Danish Biomedical Postgraduate Training Center. After a brief summary of the main remarks by the director of the course, the representatives from WHO (Dr L. Blanc), JATA (Dr M. Suchi) and the Ministry of Health (Dr Wang Zhao) congratulated the participants on their work throughout the tuberculosis course and expressed the hope that the management skills learnt during the course would translate into action back home.
