Undergraduate medical education in Indonesia and its relevance for the needs of primary health care services
Abstract As a cumulative result of efforts made over the last 15 years, Indonesian medical school teachers have developed and are implementing a common ‘core curriculum’ of undergraduate medical education in 14 government medical schools. This curric-ulum is based on explicit learning objectives. The Indonesian Government requires that all new doctors must work for between 3 and 5 years in a Primary Health Care (PHC) centre immediately after graduation. Indonesian medical school teachers and administrators have deliberately tried to shape the core curriculum to the needs of PHC in their country. This study provides a detailed ‘content analysis’ of the core curriculum in an effort to estimate the ‘relevance” of the core curriculum to the func-tions and tasks doctors are expected to undertake at the PHC level of the Indone-sian health system. It is shown that the core curriculum is largely relevant both in terms of its ‘framework’ and in its ‘details’. Some omissions from the curriculum are noted. It is contended that the development of the core curriculum is but the cul-mination of the many efforts at educational innovation and change which have been attempted in Indonesia over the last 15 years; it is contended that Indonesia's ex-perience shows that it is possible, even in a well-established system of medical schools, for teachers to plan and implement programmes of Community-Oriented Medical Education (COME); and, finally, it is contended that medical teachers in other developing countries who may wish to reorient their programmes of medical edu-cation towards the needs of Primary Health Care would benefit from a careful ex-amination of the approaches to this task which have been adopted by their col-leagues in Indonesia.