This brief orientation is intended to help you understand how CTCA and this website works, and how you can get involved.
Guidelines: CTCA produces and updates TB control guidelines. The Guidelines Steering Committee holds regular teleconferences to decide which guidelines need updates or revisions, as TB control protocols are updated. Many TB controllers & control staff, as well as private physicians, utilize these guidelines as a standard for their own practices. You can access the guidelines at any time from the left-hand tab. Many of the guidelines listed on our website are under review and/or revision, and are noted as such. Please note that for each guideline under review or revision, any supporting documents are also under review or revision.
Committees & Workgroups: Get involved! Join a workgroup. Check out the list of active workgroups. Generally these workgroups meet via teleconference once a month. You can view a report at the top of the committee and workgroup page, that each chair provides, usually once per month. This will give you a good idea of what each group is working on.
Conferences: CTCA plans a yearly educational conference for each spring, and a TB Controllers meeting in the Fall. Check out our conferences page for details on upcoming conferences and meetings, as well as information on meetings hosted by other TB organizations. Additionally, you can find archived presentations from our conferences (from 2004 until the present.) This is a valuable educational resource for TB control staff. We make these resources available to staff and the public in the weeks following a conference.
Executive Committee Meetings: Feel free to contact us if you'd like to participate in our Executive Committee meetings. You will get to hear about all of our work. We also encourage you to submit items for the discussion. Check out our Executive Committee page in this section to know the members.
Workplan: CTCA rotates and elects (some of) its officers every year and at this time we evaluate all of the tasks laid out before us and come up with a 3-year workplan.Click here to take a look at our current workplan (.xls)
Resources & Links: On this page, there are many links to our partner organizations, as well as an archive of actions and information on past advocacy issues. As an example, many in the California TB control community are feeling the effects of looming budget cuts. Recently, CTCA Executive Committee members took action by collecting impact statements from local health jurisdictions and informed Governor Schwarzenegger and the entire California legislature with a letter demonstrating that cuts to TB control programs will be disastrous to the public health. Check out the Resources and Links site to understand how CTCA is connected to the wider public health world.
Legal Issues: State laws and regulations pertaining to TB, as well as resources developed by CTCA and CDPH. Everyone working in California TB control should be familiar with legal issues.
CTCA Directory :About every other year, CTCA produces and distributes to Local Health Jurisdictions a directory of California TB control staff. We keep an online version up-to-date as staffing changes occur. Feel free to distribute the online version to all of your staff, and please let us know when there are changes to your section of the directory.
Additionally, one of CTCA’s partners - the Francis J Curry National TB Center, a Regional Tuberculosis Training and Medical Consultation Center (RTMCC) based in San Francisco, offers mini-fellowship trainings to TB care providers. Check out this opportunity on their website: www.currytbcenter.ucsf.edu
Any questions? Feel free to contact us!