STRATEGIES FOR INDONESIAN NURSING TOWARD ASEAN COMMUNITY: A PERSPECTIVE FROM A NURSE

More than 40 years ago, ASEAN countries have developed collaboration in social, economic and diplomatic relations, but today’s collaboration has grown with the cooperation in political, economic and social under three pillars of the ASEAN community, namely ASEAN PoliticalSecurity Community (APSC), the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). In this regard, there are some professions are involved in ASEAN mutual recognition arrangements (MRA), which consist of: medical doctor, dentist, surveyor, architect, accounting, engineer, and nurse. It is expected through this arrangement, especially for nursing, can make ASEAN countries close together. It is believed that ASEAN community can bring positive impacts, such as the impacts on the process of medical treatment, characteristics of the services, products of health care services, organizational management, and marketing. However, each country has its own approach to get directly involved in any sectors of MRA. But education seems to be the cutting element in this arrangement, and each country begins to have the collaboration, such as to 1) increase the awareness among people and young generation with the dissemination of information and knowledge of the ASEAN community; 2) promote ASEAN identity in education; 3) produce human resources in the education field, and 4) make networking among universities in ASEAN. This collaboration has actually been implemented by the Indonesian government, especially in term of