Among OECD countries in 2022, South Korea had the highest rate of yearly visits to a doctor per capita. On average, people in South Korea visited the doctors 15.7 times per year in person. Health care utilization is an important indicator of the success of a country’s health care system. There are many factors that affect health care utilization including healthcare structure and the supply of health care providers.

OECD health systems

Healthcare systems globally include a variety of tools for accessing healthcare, including private insurance based systems, like in the U.S., and universal systems, like in the U.K. Health systems have varying costs among the OECD countries. Worldwide, Europe has the highest expenditures for health as a proportion of the GDP. Among all OECD countries, The United States had the highest share of government spending on health care. Recent estimates of current per capita health expenditures showed the United States also had, by far, the highest per capita spending on health worldwide.

Supply of health providers

Globally, the country with the highest physician density is Cuba, although most other countries with high number of physicians to population was found in Europe. The number of graduates of medicine impacts the number of available physicians in countries. Among OECD countries, Latvia had the highest rate of graduates of medicine, which was almost twice the rate of the OECD average.

As of 2022, the number of licensed physicians in the United States and the District of Columbia amounted to 1,062,460 physicians. At the time, the national population was roughly 333 million, which yielded a physician-to-population ratio of 313 licensed physicians per 100,000 population. The density of licensed U.S. physicians has steadily increased since 2010.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union consistently had more physicians per 100,000 population than the United States, with the U.S. having roughly two thirds the number of doctors per capita that the USSR had. In real numbers, there were 1.05 million physicians in the Soviet Union in 1985, compared with 0.58 million in the U.S.. In contrast, the U.S. had more dentists per capita than the Soviet Union in these years (which had notoriously bad overall dental care), while the share of nurses was higher in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, but higher in the U.S. in the 1980s. Healthcare in the Soviet Union Despite this relatively large difference in the number of doctors, the death rate in the Soviet Union increased greatly in these years, while it fell in the U.S.. Until the 1970s, healthcare in the Soviet Union had been a centralized system, among the most competent and reliable in the world, and it oversaw significant improvements in the living standards of Soviet citizens while maintaining developmental pace with the west. This system was overhauled in the 1970s, however, and the economic downturn of the following two decades meant that the Soviet healthcare system then deteriorated. Internal standards dropped, less time was spent on patients, and access to medicines (particularly antibiotics) and equipment fell. The supposedly "free" system also became increasingly dominated by under the table payments, where citizens could be expected to pay 500 rubles (2.5 times the average monthly salary) for an operation or baby delivery.

While the number of physicians and hospital beds increased in the 1970s and 1980s, the lack of training saw an overall decline in the standard of healthcare provided. In these decades, a private healthcare system also opened for Soviet elites, and a disproportionate amount of healthcare professionals defected from state-run hospitals. Following Soviet dissolution in the 1990s, attempted reforms in successor states often failed due to economic mismanagement, and the quality of healthcare dropped even further in many areas, before gradually improving in the past two decades.

Health professionals, especially primary care physicians, are in high demand in many parts of the U.S. Some areas are experiencing health professional shortages. This map shows the ratio of population to primary care physicians in the U.S. Areas in dark red show where there are less primary care physicians per person.The data comes from County Health Rankings, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, measure the health of nearly all counties in the nation and rank them within states. The layer used in the map comes from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, and the full documentation for the layer can be found here.County data are suppressed if, for both years of available data, the population reported by agencies is less than 50% of the population reported in Census or less than 80% of agencies measuring crimes reported data.

Medical Doctors in Turkey increased to 2.18 per 1000 people in 2021 from 2.05 per 1000 people in 2020. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for Turkey Medical Doctors.

In 2019, there were nearly 30 active physicians per 10,000 resident population in the United States. This statistic shows the number of active physicians per 10,000 resident population in the United States from 1975 to 2019.

In Mexico, the number of practicing doctors amounted to around 2.51 professionals per 1,000 inhabitants in 2021, an increase compared to the figures reported a year earlier when there were around 2.41 practicing physicians per every thousand people. During the last year depicted, the number of physicians in Mexico totaled approximately 324,000 professionals.

Density of doctors worldwide

In a global comparison, Mexico ranks in an middle category for density of medical doctors per 1,000 population, similar to Japan and Qatar. Among the countries in the upper bracket for highest density of doctors are Cuba, Georgia, Lithuania, and Greece. Along with Mexico’s moderate density of doctors, over 39 percent of the population was considered vulnerable due to lack of access to health services in Mexico as of 2022, up from around 21.5 percent a decade earlier.

Health care in Mexico

Nearly 33 million people in Mexico held public health insurance through Seguro Popular in 2020, which was replaced by a new institution at the beginning of that year, called INSABI (Instituto Nacional de Salud para el Bienestar). However, the IMSS (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social) led by a large margin as the largest provider of health insurance in the North American country.

This statistic displays the average physician-to-population ratio in select U.S. metropolitan areas as of 2013. During this year, there was an average of 268.1 physicians per 100,000 population in Detroit. Boston has one of the overall highest average wait times for a physician appointment. The average cumulative wait time is approximately 18.5 days in 2014, which has decreased since 2004.

Graph and download economic data for Medical Services Expenditures per Capita by Disease: Mental Illness , Blended Account Basis (MNINEIPCBLEND) from 2000 to 2021 about mental health, disease, physicians, healthcare, medical, health, expenditures, per capita, services, and USA.

Physicians (per 1,000 people) in Malawi was reported at 0.049 in 2022, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. Malawi - Physicians - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on March of 2025.

This statistic shows the total number of doctors of medicine in the United States from 1949 to 2015. In 1949, there were 201,277 doctors of medicine in the United States. Some 50 years later, the number was around four times as high. In 2015, the exact number of doctors of medicine was 1,085,783.

Nurses in the United States increased to 12.19 per 1000 people in 2023 from 12.05 per 1000 people in 2022. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for the United States Nurses.

Medical Doctors in Germany increased to 4.98 per 1000 people in 2021 from 4.90 per 1000 people in 2020. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for Germany Medical Doctors.

Long-term quantitative series for 20 Latin American countries, spanning from 1960 to 2020, on the number of hospital beds, physicians, nurses and healthcare expenditure.

Matus-Lopez, M. and Fernández Pérez, P. 2023. "Transformations in Latin American Healthcare: A Retrospective Analysis of Hospital Beds, Medical Doctors, and Nurses from 1960 to 2022". Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business.

The information was extracted from official reports and cross-country databases. Official reports were available in digital format in the Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (IRIS) of Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). They were summary of four-year reports on Health Conditions in the Americas (PAHO 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002a), annual reports of Basic Indicators (PAHO 2002b, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2013), Health in South America (PAHO 2012) and Core Indicators (PAHO 2016). Databases were Open Data Portal of the Pan American Health Organization (PLISA) (PAHO 2023), Core Indicator Database provided directly by PAHO (PAHO 2022), Data Portal of National Health Workforce Accounts of the World Health Organization (NHWA) (WHO 2022), and the Global Health Expenditure Database of the World Health Organization (GHED) (WHO 2023).

Serie 1. Hospital Beds per 1,000 inhabitants

Serie 2. Physicians per 10,000 inhabitants

Serie 3. Nurses per 10,000 inhabitants

Serie 4. Government spending on health, per capita. Constant US dollars of 2020

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In 2022, there were approximately 2.41 medical doctors per 1,000 people in Brazil, a decrease compared to the highest physician density of about 2.49 doctors per thousand inhabitants reported two years earlier. That same year, the number of doctors registered in the South American country totaled about 584 thousand professionals, most of them based in São Paulo.

The states with the most number of active physicians include California, New York, Texas, and Florida. California currently has the most number of active physicians of any U.S. state, with around 125,566 physicians. In California, the specialties with the most physicians are psychiatry, emergency medicine, and anesthesiology. Specialty areas In general, the most common specialty areas for physicians in the U.S. are emergency medicine, psychiatry, surgery, and anesthesiology. As of 2024, there were around 58,900 psychiatrists in the U.S. Concerning the gender distribution of specialty physicians, males out number females in almost every specialty, with exceptions found in mainly in various pediatric disciplines, and obstetrics and gynecology. Compensation The specialty areas with the highest average annual compensation are plastic surgery, orthopedics, and cardiology. As of 2024, a physician in orthopedics earned an average of 558,000 U.S. dollars per year. Male physicians still earn more than their female counterparts in both primary care and specialty settings. This difference is especially large in specialty settings where male physicians earn more than 100,000 dollars more per year than female physicians.

I medici negli Stati Uniti sono aumentati a 2,77 per 1000 persone nel 2019 rispetto a 2,74 per 1000 persone nel 2018. Valori correnti, dati storici, previsioni, statistiche, grafici e calendario economico - Stati Uniti - Medici.

As of May 2024, the total number of professionally active physicians in the United States amounted to 1,109,460 physicians. From a state perspective, California had the most number of active physicians with over 119 thousand physicians, followed by New York. On the other hand, with just 1,245 physicians, Wyoming had the least number of active physicians in the United States.

This dataset describes the number and density of health care services in each census tract in the United States. The data includes counts, per capita densities, and area densities per tract for many types of businesses in the health care sector, including doctors, dentists, mental health providers, hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmacies.