Learning Initial Risk Assessment (IRA) of Health Crisis Events at Sub-national Surveillance Tools Workshop in Jakarta

The JICA EWARS Project (Project for Strengthening Capacity for Early Warning and Response to Infectious Diseases) conducted a sub-national workshop on risk assessment between January 7 and 10, 2025, in Jakarta, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MOH), the World Health Organization (WHO) Indonesia, and other institutions.

This workshop is part of a series of events following the previous workshop held in September 2024. While the last workshop targeted national-level officials working at the Public Health Emergency Operations Center (PHEOC) and in disease-specific programs within the MOH, this workshop invited 36 sub-national officials. Participants came from the project's pilot provinces (Banten, East Kalimantan, and South Sulawesi), with three officials from each provincial health office (PHO) and three officials from each selected district health office (DHO) in each province. The workshop offered participants lectures, exercises, and group work related to initial risk assessment, the Hazard Calendar, and risk communication.

In this workshop, an expert from the project delivered presentations on initial risk assessment and a factsheet table based on the developed guidance document, with modifications to tailor the content to the sub-national context after the national-level workshop. In addition to the oral presentations, we also provided lecture videos of our presentations in Bahasa Indonesia as supporting materials for participants to review after returning to their workplaces. We believe that these lecture videos will contribute to enhancing understanding of risk assessment at the sub-national level, enabling us to reach relevant sub-national officials/parties who did not participate in the workshop by widely sharing the digital materials in our pilot provinces. Additionally, other project activities, including the monitoring and evaluation of the Indonesian national surveillance system and the project endline survey, were also introduced during this workshop.

The pre- and post-tests revealed a significant increase in scores, indicating an improvement in participants' knowledge levels regarding risk assessment. Furthermore, participants expressed high satisfaction with the workshop content, giving it an average rating of 4.6 on a scale of one to five. Moving forward, we will continue to provide support for implementing risk assessment activities at both the national and sub-national levels in Indonesia to ensure the sustainability of these efforts.