READINESS OF COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER TO SUPPORT SCHOOL REOPENING POLICY AT THE FIRST WAVE OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC: INDONESIA CONTEXT

Abstract

Indonesia has reopened schools on July 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic although the number of cases of COVID-19 among children was quite high, around 12.3% of the total cases, of which 9.5% were among school-aged children (6-18 years). This policy must be a concern of all sectors, especially the health sector through the community health center, which has the responsibility to control and prevent the transmission of COVID-19 in its working area, including at school. This study aimed to determine the readiness of the community health center to support the reopening of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was held from 13 October to 9 November 2020 and was conducted in 512 community health centers in 425 regencies/cities using questioners prepared by Google Forms. The level of readiness was obtained based on the readiness index of community health center that consists of 18 indicators. The readiness was determined by using the cut-off values obtained from the calculation of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Community health center as that had an index value of 0.8882 was considered ready and if the values was <0.8882, community health center was considered not ready. The result of the study showed that only 37.7% of community health center are ready to support school reopening. Community health center in urban/rural areas have higher readiness (41.1%) compared to community health center in remote areas (30.2%) (p=0.030) and very remote areas (23.1%) (p=0.082). It can be concluded that the readiness of community health center to support school reopening, especially to monitor and supervise schools in the pandemic era, still needs to be improved.