Development of a Sentinel Site Surveillance System to Improve Health and Nutrition Monitoring in Indonesia

Despite impressive economic growth in recent years, Indonesia continues to suffer from high rates of child stunting, wasting, severe wasting. To reduce childhood stunting and improve birthweight and child nutritional status, Indonesia has committed its own resources as well as received assistance through the Millennium Challenge Account - Indonesia (MCA-I) funded by the United States Millennium Challenge Corporation. As part of its MCA-I compact, University Research Co., LLC (URC) developed a sentinel site monitoring program for its Community-Based Health and Nutrition Project. This sentinel site monitoring program is comprised of a web-based system with offline capabilities, designed to improve accessibility of real-time relevant quality data at all management levels, promote data utilization for decision-making, and encourage coordination and integration of health program activities. The real time data is linked with a dynamic data base with demographic and other key health event data. Data for the sentinel site monitoring program comes from four sources: 1) a rapid census of households, 2) cyclical house-hold visits, 3) routine statistics of services at health facilities which is linked to the household data; and 4) periodic sample surveys. Field facilitators were recruited and trained to conduct census of households and collect household member data and update the household and household member data every 90 days for demographic and health events, and trained midwives to record health service data and link to the household and household member data. This approach could be successfully adapted and implemented in other low- and middle-income country settings to manage and monitor similar community-based health initiatives.