Community-based surveillance – Indonesia Case Study

Recent large-scale epidemics and pandemics (e.g. measles, COVID-19) have demonstrated that it takes an inclusive and collaborative effort engaging communities as full-fledged partners to effectively prevent, detect, and respond to significant infectious disease threats and minimize their effects. Epidemics begin and end in communities. Community members are usually the first to know when a suspicious or unusual health event has occurred in their community – so enabling, empowering, and equipping communities to recognize and respond to public health threats in their midst not only makes sense but also forms an essential foundation for the concept of community-based surveillance (CBS). ‘CBS is the systematic detection and reporting of events of public health significance within a community by community members.’

CBS enables the forming of resilient networks, increased public awareness of diseases, and self-initiated reporting of disease events by the community to local health authorities. Importantly
a sustainable CBS system should be for communities, by communities and should complement the existing health surveillance and response system.

The Red Cross Red Crescent membership has an innovative approach to community-based surveillance. It builds on its core community presence and strengths in community health, behaviour change and broad emergency preparedness as a critical foundation for building local capacities, ownership, and sustainability of community-based surveillance efforts.