Empowering Tuberculosis-Responsive Village Governments: an Action Research Approach

Abstract

Through Presidential Regulation No. 67/2021 on Tuberculosis Control, the Government of Indonesia has announced the urgency of an integrative approach to handling TBC diseases, including at the village level. Nonetheless, there are still bottlenecks in the implementation as not all stakeholders know their tasks and responsibility. To this day, TBC has been a domain of the Ministry of Health. It is decentralized up to provincial, regency, and sub-district levels through Community Health Services (Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat or Puskesmas). In fact, inadequacy can still be found in policy strategies—resulting in the TBC bearers being undetected, unreported, and unthreatened, which leads to persistently high TBC cases, including at the village level. Thus, it becomes necessary to push a broader role of village government considering their adjacency to society. The village government’s involvement in tracing, testing, and treatment strategy is necessary to facilitate community participation in TB prevention and control activities. This paper is based on action research focusing on strengthening village governance’s role in handling TBC prevention and control. Following a series of research to collect information regarding the needs and complexities of TB governance at the village level, the mission was followed with national-level advocacy. This was conducted to encourage further accommodating the village government’s role in contributing to TB prevention and control to the Ministry of Village, Disadvantaged Regions, and Transmigration. Despite its ongoing processes, this paper has identified strengths and weaknesses during the advocacy processes, which are expected to be considered in a future mission.