COUNTRY REVIEW OF INDONESIA Spread over 1.9 million square kilometres including over 900 permanently inhabited islands, Indonesia is a vast archipelago with a population of 234 million speaking more than 300 local languages. Ensuring access to diabetes care for the estimated seven million people living with diabetes in such a geographically challenging country is therefore no easy task, but one which the World Diabetes Foundation enthusiastically supports.
Since 2006, eight projects supported by the World Diabetes Foundation have been initiated in Indonesia with the aim of building health care capacity to improve primary prevention and diabetes care in the country. The Indonesian Society of Endocrinology and the Indonesian Diabetes Association are involved in six of these projects. Together, the projects are expected to create momentous changes in access to diabetes care in a country where the current health care capacity is severely insufficient to provide care for the estimated 4.7% of the population living with diabetes. “In our country, we only have 50 endocrinologists and they all work at university hospitals in the large cities. Since Indonesia consists of more than 17,000 islands, people living in remote areas do not have access to proper diabetes care. Therefore, building capacity by training health care personnel is an important part of the projects we initiate and support,� says Prof. Sidartawan Soegondo, President of the Indonesian Diabetes Association and initiator of several of the projects funded by the World Diabetes Foundation in Indonesia. Building primary care capacity In Indonesia, district hospitals carry out most of the primary diabetes care. However, to reduce the strain on the hospitals to enable them to concentrate on more advanced care, health care capacity at primary health care centres (called puskesmas) must be improved. This will also result in the provision of a more comprehensive and continuous management of diabetes care for the
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