dr. Yoga - My trip to Palu started at Adisucipto Airport in Yogyakarta. I met other colleagues from a variety of professional backgrounds, but shared common vision, common objective and worked for the best in the community in Palu.
I worked with patients on a daily basis, and joked with patients and team members to ease tensions. We familiarized ourselves with the many different (exotic) areas of Palu and heard many stories about the earthquake from the point of view of local people.
In my 24-day assigment in Palu, I learned a lot, exchanged views and interesting cases. These included common diseases after the earthquake, referral issues, and information widely shared after the earthquakes. Here, I would write about information distortion that I found in the community and amongst medical professionals.
As one example was a patient who was referred to me while our team conducted a health service. The patient had a vision problem after a head trauma, and a suspected fracture in the foot, although the patient mobility remained good. I suggested the patient to go to the hospital with a local nurse for further examination. We went to the patient village again after a few days, and asked the patient how it was. The patient told us that she had not gone to the hospital. We were utterly surprised and asked her why. She told us that she was about to go to the hospital, when she met a friend who just returned from the hospital. This friend told the patient that the free services would end by Wednesday (November), rather than by 25 December as I informed before. So the patient cancelled her trip to the hospital.
In another instance, a child could not get medical service in the hospital because of unending issues with the district insurance form that has to be filled. The child did not have the required documentation as they were either missing or not being prepared before.
The child had also to go to many government agencies to get necessay letter. The child (and child family) did not have money (or simply could not afford to go to those offices) that the family did not do anything. We examined the child at a refugee location during our visit to the village (the family’s house collapsed so the family could not stay there).
I also had an experience when I referred a patient to a local hospital. We found diferent information, where some said that the patient needed an ID card, Indonesia-Health card, household card and so on, but some also said that the patient could go directly to the hospital without those documents to make it easy for them to access the hospital. They said that it was a government (the President) program to have services available to patients after the earthquake in Palu on 28 October 2018.
Were we surprised?
Why not one legitimate information?
Why different information being given?
Factually, we asked whether information about the government (re. The President) issuing a policy that provided free services to earthquake survivors was given to the community?
The stories above could point to a few things:
- Information issue in Palu: this could be dealt with if village and hamlet officials were involved and trusted to dissemninate information about policy issues to the communities.
- Not everyone in Palu had a ”gadget” to connect them the internet network. Each community had their own wisdom. Some communities may use the mosque’s speaker, some may use the refugee center’s speaker, while still others preferred door-to-door information dissemination. It would be helpful to identify local leaders that could help address the information issue, that I thought could lead to viable solution to combat disinformation or conflicting information. Hence, the way forwards was quite simply to increase participation of local leaders in disaster management or in day-to-day community health management.
- Additionally, there was a need to get health officials in Palu to agree on a common information to disseminate to public and to health volunteers.