The UN institution, which was also the lending partner, wanted to know how well the Indonesian Government and the local UN branch performed to reform the medical education system. The UN also wanted to know if the project was cost-effective in the short and long-term, hence informing the feasibility of additional funding rounds.

A major UN institution active globally, the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health.

At the time of project appraisal, the Indonesian health sector faced significant human resources (HRH) challenges. Although the total availability of health personnel was not low, there were issues regarding HRH distribution, skill mix, and healthcare personnel quality. The production of new physicians had grown steadily; in 2010, only the production was approximately 9,000 new physicians/year. There were imbalances across provinces and rural and urban areas regarding the distribution of health professionals. HRH quality was a growing concern in Indonesia during project preparation as only half of the physicians, midwives, and nurses correctly responded to vignette questions related to antenatal, pediatric curative, and adult curative care. The trends in the quality of the healthcare professionals’ services were associated with the fast expansion in the number of private schools.

At the time of project preparation, some initiatives placed the foundation for establishing a quality assurance system for health professional education. Nonetheless, these were not sufficient. As a result, a major lending project was funded, which had its main objective to enhance quality assurance policies governing health professionals’ education in Indonesia.

An evaluation of a US$77.82 Million project implemented in Indonesia aimed at enhancing the quality of medical education was run. As part of the assessment, we assessed: the risks and the quality of outcome indicators and framework, the funders, and government performance. Mainly, we evaluated the project costs and financing, performed a cost-benefit analysis, evaluated the implementation support, the M&E systems, framework, and capacity, etc. For this purpose, we used administrative and qualitative data, workshop results, and internal documents.

The results informed the funder (UN institution) about the feasibility of extending funding for the project. The project involved close collaboration with the UN country teams and Government representatives.