Health Minister: Indonesia Faces Shortage of 93,000 General Practitioners
Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin has stated that Indonesia still lacks 93,200 general practitioners to meet national healthcare needs in the coming years. This deficit was identified after the government mapped the national requirements for medical and healthcare personnel for the next ten years across every regency and city.
“So, if we say we already have enough, the issue lies in distribution; the data we possess suggests otherwise,” Boded during a working meeting with Commission IX of the House of Representatives in Jakarta on Monday, 8 June 2026.
Budi revealed that the requirement for general practitioners is estimated to reach 255,420 people by 2032, whereas the supply of general practitioners will only be 162,220 in the same year. Consequently, there will be a shortage of 93,200 general practitioners, particularly if there is no acceleration in meeting these needs. “Our annual graduates are only around 12,000, or perhaps 13,000–14,000 people, to close this gap,” Budi noted.
He explained that the calculation is based on medical personnel supply capacity, attrition (including retirements and deaths of doctors), inter-regional movement, and the number of new graduates each year. The Ministry of Health also calculated the need for doctors based on healthcare service data, patient queues, medical staff working hours, available healthcare facilities, and projections of demographic and epidemiological changes in the population.
Budi added that in the national guidelines for medical and healthcare personnel requirements drafted by the Ministry of Health, the government also accounts for changes in population structure that will affect future healthcare needs. Based on these observations, several regions are noted to have a larger elderly population compared to children under five. This condition causes the demand for internal medicine specialists to increase more rapidly than for paediatricians or obstetricians.
In addition to demographic changes, the government also noted an increase in cases of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia, which require different specialist competencies than in the past.