Table 1.

Unit costs of TB services and interventions.¹⁸

Intervention	Description	Unit	Unit cost of output (2016 US$)	Source
Nurse time	1 minute of professional nurses' time	Per minute	0.34	Nicola Foster, unpublished XTEND data
Inpatient day	Cost of hospitalization	Per bed-day	44.44	Edina Sinanovic, unpublished XTEND data
OPD visit	Nurse consultation, 12 minutes average duration	per event	4.08	Nicola Foster, unpublished XTEND data
IPT treatment	One OPD visit a month (at half cost as on HIV) + INH + Xpert cost every year	per month	7.81	Salome Charalambous, written personal communication, October 2016
First-line TB treatment	Facility-based observation, 2 months intensive phase; 4 months continuation phase	per patient month	21.43	Treatment regimens from The Aurum Institute (2016).20 Drug prices from National Department of Health's master procurement catalog,April 8, 2016.21 Only 20% of patients are treated under DOTS; the rest visit the facility once a month to collect drugs (Dr Lindiwe Mvusi, National Department of Health, oral personal communication, November 2016).
MDR-TB treatment	6 months intensive phase; 18 months continuation phase	per patient month	359.06	As for first-line treatment. From Sinanovic et al (2015),22 40% of patients are hospitalized during intensive phase; the rest receive fully decentralized treatment
TB diagnostics	Sum of costs of first- and second-line diagnostic tests, including visits and antibiotics∗	per person diagnosed	53.65	Costs of first-line diagnostics from Cunnama et al (2016),23 Costs of monitoring tests from Edina Sinanovic, unpublished XTEND data
WHO symptoms screener	4 minutes of a professional nurse	per suspect screened	1.36	Nicola Foster, unpublished XTEND data
Cough triage	1.3 minutes of professional nurse asking cough question	per suspect screened	0.68	MERGE trial

DOTS indicates directly observed treatment, short course; INH, isoniazid; IPT, isoniazid preventive therapy; MDR-TB, multidrug-Resistant tuberculosis; OPD, outpatient department.

Note. Shaded activities represent interventions introduced or modified under the 2017-2022 National TB Plan, as opposed to routine services.

^∗Cost per person diagnosed calculated as a weighted average of the unit costs of each test from the XTEND trial, where the weights represent the probability of receiving each test experienced by diagnosed patients in the XTEND cohort.

Adapted from Bozzani et al.¹⁸