In Vietnam, an intervention called the “cash transfer UHC+ intervention” combined cash transfers with social health insurance (SHI) for people with drug-susceptible tuberculosis (TB). This study assesses the acceptability of a social protection package containing cash transfers and SHI for people with TB in Vietnam.
Findings indicated that both conditional and unconditional cash transfers paired with SHI were acceptable across six dimensions of acceptability: affective attitude, perceived effectiveness, ethicality, burden, intervention coherence, opportunity cost, and self-efficacy. SHI was viewed as a necessity by almost all participants, but people with TB questioned the quality of care received when utilizing it for auxiliary TB services. Access to multiple sources of social protection was deemed necessary to fully offset the costs of TB care. This study suggests further assessing the impact of cash transfer interventions on health and economic outcomes with the possibility of scaling up.