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View all search resultsRemote regions feel weight of COVID-19
The coronavirus knows no administrative borders. It has spread to 501 of the country’s 514 regencies and cities, including some remote regencies, prompting doctors to worry that the pandemic might spread further to remote areas and exhaust their already poor health infrastructure.
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n May, two months after Indonesia reported its first COVID-19 cases in Greater Jakarta, more than 1000 kilometers away, a doctor was tending to an unconscious 50-year-old woman with a swollen belly. Her skin and eyes were turning yellow due to liver failure.
The doctor, 27-year-old Doni Trinanda, suggested that the family refer the woman to a hospital in Toraja, some seven hours away by car -- or even up to a day -- from their remote subdistrict of Pana in Mamasa regency, West Sulawesi.
But COVID-19 fears loomed over the family. They decided to sign an informed consent document allowing Doni to act on the patient with all its consequences, a common practice among Indonesian general practitioners in remote areas, given the limited resources.
The woman’s condition improved for a while following the treatment at a community health center (Puskesmas). She could joke and laugh along with Doni and her family, Doni said. But four days later, she died in her sleep.
“I cried. The patient had come weak and unconscious, and then [after treatment], she could eat and laugh. But [she passed away] because we were late in referring her [to the hospital],” Doni said in a phone interview on Thursday. “If only we had a hospital some 1.5 hours away from the Puskesmas; a better place to look after her, maybe she would have survived.”
Doni has been deployed to Pana since 2018 as part of the Nusantara Sehat (Healthy Indonesia) program, which deploys doctors and other medical workers to remote regions to strengthen primary healthcare services.
