In mainstreaming nutrition in UHC, by 2024, 83% of primary health care facility have been equipped by the essential health workers, including skilled nutritionist and midwives

Moving towards UHC requires strengthening health systems that depends on the availability, accessibility, and capacity of health and care workers to deliver quality nutrition services. Indonesia commits to meet the essential health workforce requirements in 83% of primary health care, including skilled nutritionist, in 2024 to support achievement of national medium-term development plan. Human resources for health in Indonesia have grown rapidly over the last decade, as shown by the increasing ratio between health workers and the population. The basic health workforce available in Indonesia includes general practitioners and specialized doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, pharmacists, public health staffs, sanitarians, nutritionists, and medical laboratory technicians.

A health workers with adequate skills is critical to the attainment of any population healthy goal. At the level of nutrition service provision, quality services include a nutrition-skilled workforce that receives integrated supportive supervision to further build their capacity to deliver integrated essential nutrition care, particularly infant and young child feeding counselling and integrated management of acute malnutrition as well as nutrition in emergency. Efforts will be made to enhance the knowledge and skills of health workers to deliver quality nutrition services to children by improving the training and the supportive supervision.

Since 2014, Indonesia has made substantial efforts to strengthening counselling skills of nutritionists, midwives, and other health staff in more than 10,000 primary health centres across the country. However, due to high staff turnover and lack of supportive supervision, a limited number of health workers have benefited from such efforts. It is in this context that the Government plans to accelerate efforts to strengthen the infant and young child feeding (IYCF) counselling skills of nutritionists and midwives. Notably, the IYCF counselling training materials and tools have recently been updated in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, an online course of IYCF counselling has been developed to improve the access to learning materials.

In addition, since 2019, Indonesia has begun to roll-out health workers training on the integrated management of acute malnutrition to improve the quality and coverage of child wasting prevention and treatment services. Both offline and online standard updated training materials and tools have been developed to facilitate the implementation of training for health workers. Continued efforts will be made to expand the cascade training to reach nutritionists, midwives, doctors and nurses in at least 60% of primary health care facilities.