The Supply Side of Cancer Care in Indonesia

Executive summary

This report examines whether Indonesia's health system has the capacity to deliver cancer care, using the World Health Organization's six health-system building blocks and an Availability, Accessibility, and Quality framework. It looks at the oncology workforce, the availability of cancer services and radiotherapy, financing, essential medicines and technology, the information system, and governance, and shows how unequally each is spread across the country.

Workforce density is drawn from the Ministry of Health DREAMS and SI-SDMK records for 2025, facility services from the SIRS facility register, population denominators from the 2025 national statistics projection, and financing from the BPJS Kesehatan Sample Data for the regular scheme. Cost figures are verified-paid claim values weighted to national projections, not budget realisation, and the headcount workforce counts a clinician once for each facility, so a clinician serving several facilities is counted more than once.

Questions this report answers

• How many oncology clinicians does Indonesia have, and how concentrated are they across districts?
• Where can a patient actually reach radiotherapy and cancer services, and where can they not?
• How fast is cancer spending growing, and which cancers drive the cost?
• How do workforce, facilities, and financing score on availability, accessibility, and quality?

Key findings

• The oncology workforce is very small and highly concentrated: Indonesia has 129 medical haematology-oncology positions and 171 radiation oncologists nationwide, a density of only 0.045 and 0.060 per 100,000 people.
• Access to specialists is deeply uneven: 90.9 percent of districts and cities have no medical haematology-oncologist at all, and the inequality of distribution across districts reaches a Gini coefficient of 0.952, close to extreme concentration.
• Radiotherapy is the most critical geographic barrier: only 136 hospitals, 4.2 percent of all hospitals, offer radiotherapy, about one unit for every 2.09 million people, and 84.4 percent of districts have no radiotherapy access while 6 provinces have none at all.
• Capacity sits in the centre: 52.2 percent of radiotherapy capacity is concentrated on Java island.
• Cancer spending is rising fast: verified-paid cancer claims reached Rp 6.74 trillion in 2024 and Rp 34.81 trillion cumulatively over 2015 to 2024, a 2.5-fold rise since 2017, at an average of Rp 12.04 million per patient per year, with breast cancer the largest single cost.
• This spending surge has come even as delivery capacity has stayed concentrated in a few referral centres, so funding is expanding faster than the system's reach.