Pharmacy Education and Transition to Practice in Indonesia

Pharmacy education in Indonesia is expected to prepare pharmacists for a wide range of roles in a health system where medicines are central to prevention and treatment. Yet workforce studies describing capability gaps, uneven distribution, and variation in service delivery across sectors and regions suggest that ensuring new graduates are ready for practice remains a persistent challenge. This evidence-informed narrative review describes the pharmacist education pipeline in Indonesia and maps how competency expectations are specified, taught and assessed across the main stages of education and early professional transition. It synthesizes national levers that shape curriculum expectations and external assurance, including the Ministry of Health professional standard and national competency standard, nationally agreed learning outcomes, external accreditation instruments, and the national pharmacist competency examination. The review outlines the undergraduate pharmacy program followed by the professional program, including supervised work-based learning, and highlights implementation considerations reported in the literature. Key challenges include heterogeneity in institutional and placement capacity, difficulty translating broad competency domains into observable performance during experiential learning, and ongoing debate about the benefits and limitations of national assessment. This review integrates policy and standards documents with empirical studies while noting limitations in the availability of national outcome data, sparse multi-site reporting on experiential learning implementation, and limited longitudinal evidence linking education processes to early-career practice and service outcomes.