Minister promotes healthy lifestyle
JAKARTA (JP): Preventing an illness is better than curing it, Minister of Health Faried Anfasa Moeloek said on Monday, in a speech that was part of a campaign to promote healthy living.
Addressing the 15th anniversary of Open University (UT) in Ciputat subdistrict, some 15 kilometers south of Jakarta, he said the health ministry would therefore no longer suggest a curative, but a preventive approach to health care.
"The illness-prevention paradigm focuses its approach on healthy people. It encourages people to be self-reliant and take care of their health with higher awareness," he said.
The minister emphasized the importance of a shift in the health paradigm, saying that the investment and necessary government intervention needed to keep people healthy was more cost-effective than it was to cure sick people.
"When compared with the curative approach in the past, people went to see the doctor and looked for medical treatment after they got sick," he said.
While suggesting a long-term campaign process, he emphasized the importance of including the new paradigm in school curricula.
"Public understanding of the Healthy Paradigm requires good public education, including health education," he said, quoting the 1997 Jakarta Declaration on Health Promotion.
About 500 UT students from Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang, Bekasi and Bandung attended the occasion. Similar activities were also held in other cities where the university has offices. UT has about 360,000 students, including several students studying abroad.
Responding to the minister's statement, UT's deputy rector for cooperation affairs Asmawi Zainal said the university is obliged to include material on public health in its lesson modules.
"The students could then disseminate the public health policies to the people," Asmawi said.
"This would be one of our contributions to the country, especially in increasing public awareness."
Acknowledging that most UT students belong to Indonesia's middle and lower socioeconomic groups, he said this would make the dissemination of information more effective.
"(The students) usually have great influence on their surroundings," Asmawi said.
More experts
The minister said health promotion and development would also require more experts on nutrition, hygiene, health law and health management.
"We only have 3,000 such experts, while we need a total of 22,500 experts," Moeloek said.
He cited the importance of having experts that could extract bioactive substances from herbs.
"We'll pay more attention on the development of Indonesian jamu (herbal medicine)," he said. "If we could extract the bioactive substances from the herbs, we could use jamu to cure sicknesses."
He said the Ministry of Health had developed a social health insurance scheme, aimed not only at curing sick people, but also at making sure healthy people remain healthy. (05)