Seventy-Six Years: Why Is Doctors' Day Also a Humanitarian Question?

On 24 October 2026 the Indonesian Medical Association marks seventy-six years since its founding, and the date is observed as National Doctors' Day. It is usually read as a professional milestone, a morning of greetings from ministries and hospitals. It is also a humanitarian date: the work it commemorates increasingly happens where humanitarian agencies work, in disaster response, in conflict and in districts that no specialist wants to be posted to.

The association began as a legal fact. According to ANTARA, IDI was established on 24 October 1950, five years after the proclamation of independence and months after sovereignty was transferred at the end of 1949. A profession organised in a country short of physicians now spends its anniversary on air quality at home and detained colleagues abroad, which is a change in the job description as much as in the calendar.

The humanitarian frame is not rhetorical. The World Health Organization estimates a projected shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030, concentrated in low and lower-middle income countries, and names difficulty in attracting staff to rural, remote and underserved areas as one reason the gap persists. In an emergency that shortage is measured in hours rather than years. A doctor working through a fire season is the same profession with less margin.

The local challenge

This year the anniversary falls inside a respiratory emergency. According to figures released through the national disaster agency on 22 October, health facilities recorded 333,470 accumulated cases of acute respiratory infection, known in Indonesia as ISPA, in fire-affected areas between 18 August and 21 October 2026. Of that total, 258,298 were patients aged five and over and 75,172 were children under five. “The spread of recorded cases covers 68 districts and cities in seven provinces,” said Then Suyanti, the ministry's director of environmental health, linking the steep rise to thickening haze.

At the anniversary event, IDI chair Slamet Budiarto said prolonged exposure can produce respiratory and lung infection and, over the long term, cancer, and pointed to air quality in affected cities, including Palembang, as unhealthy to hazardous. He said no significant reports of illness among health workers had reached the association, and that doctors were still seeing patients in masks. The private hospitals association reported outpatient respiratory visits rising, with some hospitals giving multivitamins to their own staff.

The global challenge

Abroad, the threat is deliberate. On 14 August the World Health Organization said it had recorded more than 10,400 attacks on health care across 29 countries and territories since 2018, with about 5,700 deaths and more than 8,000 injuries, and that no one had been held accountable. Between January and August 2026 it counted more than 900 attacks, at least 900 deaths and more than 1,400 injuries, a rate above four a day, most in Ukraine, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territory.

WHO records the consequence as lost service. A study of 69 attacks in northwest Syria found outpatient consultations fell 51 per cent the following day and stayed reduced for up to 37 days. In Sudan 37 per cent of assessed facilities were non-functional in 2026; in Gaza all 36 hospitals have been damaged. The agency also recorded 44 incidents of detention of health workers and patients, affecting 94 people.

Two questions follow the greetings, and neither is ceremonial. At home: whether district air readings will be published beside the case counts while the season is still running. Abroad: whether the ten-thousandth attack on a hospital will produce the first prosecution.

In six frames

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