Community Readiness as A Pre-Requisite for Effective Health Interventions: A Case Study from The ‘Pencerah Nusantara’ Program

Abstraksi

Community participation is increasingly acknowledged as crucial for interventions aiming to improve health outcomes. It is also recognized globally as an essential principle of Primary Health Care and Health Systems Reform. In remote areas, community participation is especially critical to build self-reliant communities. However, for involvement efforts to be successful, understanding the community’s readiness to engage in interventions to tackle health issues is necessary. A Community Readiness Model (CRM) were conducted prior to the implementation of Pencerah Nusantara, a programme aiming to improve maternal-child health in isolated areas in Indonesia through primary healthcare strengthening and community empowerment. The CRM is used to measure preparedness of the community to implement health interventions and to determine intervention design. The CRM stipulate different stages of community readiness, through various determinants. The CRM was conducted in 16 locations of Pencerah Nusantara implementation. Initial results indicates most communities started at a relatively low stage of readiness on awareness, planning, knowledge on health issues, and community support, but scored high on local resources and leadership. Findings suggest that interventions should target low-scoring aspects, while utilising existing leadership and local resources to increase readiness. After 1 year of focused intervention, the stage of community readiness increased to the high stages of CRM, namely the ‘preplanning and initiation’ stage. Applying CRM provides guidance on how to engage communities according to their capacity. Assessing community participation as a process and dealing with critical issues around empowerment, leadership, and availability of local resources would further enhance the intervention impact.