Background: Compliance to therapy plays an important role in the outcome of the therapy. Non-compliance is believed to delay sputum conversion to smear negative and help the emergence of most dreaded complication, resistant mutant strains. Present study was aimed to study factors responsible for non-compliance of anti-tuberculosis treatment in continuation phase in urban area. Material and Methods: Present study was longitudinal observational study, conducted in Category I newly diagnosed Pulmonary Tuberculosis patients registered at urban TU who were sputum positive at the start of treatment and were negative at the end of intensive phase. Results: 43(21%) patients were in non-compliance group. This noncompliance group had to be given extra attention for 1month beside their continuation phase period. This group of non-compliant patients therefore impose more time, money and human resources, an extra burden on health services & health care personnel for their treatment compared to usual time taken by compliance group patient. There is need to emphasis more on educating the patients about the expected side effects of drugs at the beginning of treatment as it was noticed that awareness of drug side effects was low among patients in both the groups. Further it was also seen that patients having drug side effects were more likely to be non-compliant. Hence it is recommended to make patients aware about probable drug side effect at the beginning of drug treatment course and report them. Conclusion: Factors related to DOT provider like patients’ satisfaction with DOT provider’s behavior, enquiry about health of patients & home visit by DOT provider was found to be protective for treatment compliance in the present study.

Non-compliance, anti-tuberculosis treatment, continuation phase, DOT provider