General practitioners on Friday called on the public to consult with them before seeing a specialist to treat their symptoms.
“We want to restore the role of general practitioners, which is being bypassed. GPs are supposed to be the first line in giving people primary healthcare, but people do not always come to them,” Mawary Edi from the Indonesian General Practitioners Association (PDUI) said.
He was speaking at a press conference following the first national gathering of general practitioners in South Jakarta.
The event was opened by Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih who, on the sidelines, emphasized the urgency of primary healthcare for mothers, children and family planning programs.
General practitioners could participate in health services through various methods, including through early detection, such as for cervical cancer, and early therapy, the media heard.
Mawary said people often opted to consult with specialists rather than GPs, while those who could not afford to go to specialists resorted to non-medical alternatives.
“The implications are high costs [for the patients] and wrong diagnosess. If someone consults with a non-medical worker, they might receive substandard services and if someone comes to a non-primary healthcare provider, the service might be incomprehensive,” he said.
Mawary said that GPs were trying to change this “unstructured” situation through strengthening their role in the community’s healthcare. “Structured treatment”, he said, meant that when someone saw a doctor, they would get what they were supposed to receive, not what they wanted.
Mawary added that what patients perceived as the ideal service for themselves might not always
be right.
Thus, in a structured method, patients would follow a referral system, in which they would go to a GP first for treatment before the GP referred them to a specialist if necessary, he elaborated.
Currently, there are more than 50,000 general practitioners in Indonesia, with 17,000 in the capital alone.
This is more than twice the number of specialists operating in the country.
Dyah A Waluyo from the PDUI said many people still doubted the quality of general practitioners, despite the profession’s huge potential for participation in the community, such as assisting normal births and handling HIV-related cases.
She said that in the future, the association would also need to establish standard practice for GPs, which would be the benchmark.
“We cannot deny, for example, that there are some GPs who run poor practices,” she said.
GPs should also constantly polish their knowledge and skills to keep up with the current demand,
Dyah said.
She added that Indonesia had a high number of HIV/AIDS cases, and that if they were all be handled only by specialist doctors while GPs continued to lack the competency to handle them, the number of cases would keep on rising.
In December, there were at least 298,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in Indonesia according to the National AIDS Commission (KPA).
“There are also many lupus sufferers in Indonesia. If GPs cannot perform early detection for the disease, more young women will realize too late that they have the disease,” Dyah said.
The association stressed the urgent need to apply the Social Security System (SJSN) Law, which, it said, would help facilitate the way for “structured” health services.
The 2004 law, which was designed to ensure affordable health services for all citizens, has long been pormoted, but has not been effectively implemented. (dis)
