The largest share of the healthcare workforce in Indonesia is made up by nurses (38%). The second largest group are medical doctors (19%), followed by midwives (17%), pharmacists (6%), and public health personnel (7%). The remaining 13 per cent represent ‘physiotherapists, nutritionists, clinical psychologists, and other health professionals’ (Claramita et al., 2017, p.24). The Ministry of health declared that in 2013 among medical doctors, 33 per cent were geriatric specialists, 32 per cent were surgical specialists, 29 per cent were paediatric specialists, and 27 per cent were obstetric and gynaecologic specialists (Ministry of Health Republic of Indonesia, 2015b, p.28).

Overall, density of health care professionals is small in comparison to world average. The OECD estimates that in 2012 Indonesia had 0.3 physicians (OECD average 3.2) and 1 nurse per 1,000 population (OECD average 8.8) (OECD Health Statistics Database, 2014). As of 2015, the World Bank (World Bank, 2015) does not record any community health workers (per 1,000 people) for Indonesia. While internationally there were 16 physicians on average available per 10,000 populations, there were only 2.9 in Indonesia in 2016 (Claramita et al., 2017, pp.24,27). We are unable to identify the number of, social workers, neurologists, or geriatricians per 100,000 population by public and private sector. As discussed previously, there are large differences in the availability of healthcare workers between urban and rural areas. To address the low provision of medical doctors, education of primary care physicians has been on the policy agenda following the National Act No. 20 in 2013 (Claramita et al., 2017, pp.24,27).

References:

Claramita, M., Syah, N. A., Ekawati, F. M., Hilman, O., & Kusnanto, H. (2017). Primary Health Care Systems (PRIMASYS): Comprehensive case study from Indonesia. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/alliance-hpsr/projects/AHPSR-PRIMASYS-Indonesia-comprehensive.pdf

Ministry of Health Republic of Indonesia. (2015b). National Strategy: Management of Alzheimer and Other Dementia Diseases: Towards Healthy and Productive Older Persons. Ministry of Health Republic of Indonesia.

OECD Health Statistics Database. (2014). OECD Health Statistics 2014 How does Indonesia compare ? http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Briefing-Note-INDONESIA-2014.pdf

World Bank. (2015). Community health workers (per 1,000 people) – Indonesia. World Health Organisation’s Global Health Workforce Statistics, OECD. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.CMHW.P3?locations=ID