The average for 2020 based on 27 countries was 3.56 doctors per 1,000 people. The highest value was in Austria: 5.35 doctors per 1,000 people and the lowest value was in Brazil: 2.05 doctors per 1,000 people. The indicator is available from 1960 to 2021. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

Physicians (per 1,000 people) in United States was reported at 3.608 in 2021, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. United States - Physicians - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on October of 2025.

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.

Austria leads the world in physician density with **** practicing doctors per thousand population in 2022, highlighting significant disparities in healthcare access globally. This stark contrast becomes evident when comparing Austria to countries like India, South Africa, and Indonesia, which have less than * physician per 1,000 people. Life expectancy and healthcare access Interestingly, countries with higher physician densities often correlate with higher life expectancies. Switzerland, for instance, boasts both a high physician density of **** per 1,000 people and the highest life expectancy globally at **** years. This relationship underscores the potential impact of accessible healthcare on population health. However, exceptions exist, as evidenced by the United States, where life expectancy has decreased in recent years despite having **** physicians per 1,000 people. Factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid epidemic have contributed to this decline. Healthcare expenditure and physician density While physician density is an important metric, it does not always directly correlate with healthcare spending. The United States, for example, has the highest per capita health expenditure among OECD countries, spending over ****** U.S. dollars per person in 2023. This is significantly higher than countries with greater physician densities like Austria and Germany. The U.S. also allocates the largest share of its GDP to healthcare, at **** percent. The United States is an outlier regarding the correlation between healthcare spending, resources and health outcomes.

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

Medical Doctors in the United States increased to 2.77 per 1000 people in 2019 from 2.74 per 1000 people in 2018. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for the United States Medical Doctors.

In Mexico, the number of practicing doctors amounted to **** professionals per 1,000 inhabitants in 2023, an increase compared to the figures reported a year earlier when there were **** practicing physicians per every thousand people. During 2022, the number of physicians in Mexico totaled approximately ******* professionals. Density of doctors worldwide In a global comparison, Mexico ranks in a middle category for density of medical doctors per 1,000 population, similar to Canada and Colombia. Among the countries in the upper bracket for highest density of doctors are Cuba, Sweden, Belgium, and Uruguay. Along with Mexico’s moderate density of doctors, over ** percent of the population was considered vulnerable due to lack of access to health services in Mexico as of 2022, up from around **** percent a decade earlier. Health care in Mexico Nearly ** ******* 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.

United States US: Physicians: per 1000 People data was reported at 2.568 Ratio in 2014. This records an increase from the previous number of 2.554 Ratio for 2013. United States US: Physicians: per 1000 People data is updated yearly, averaging 1.900 Ratio from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2014, with 39 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 2.704 Ratio in 2004 and a record low of 1.100 Ratio in 1960. United States US: Physicians: per 1000 People data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s USA – Table US.World Bank: Health Statistics. Physicians include generalist and specialist medical practitioners.; ; World Health Organization's Global Health Workforce Statistics, OECD, supplemented by country data.; Weighted average;

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.

In 2019, there were nearly ** 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.

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

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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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.

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 ***** 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 **** days in 2014, which has decreased since 2004.

In 2025, there were approximately **** medical doctors per 1,000 people in Brazil, an increase compared to the physician density of about **** doctors per 1,000 inhabitants reported a year earlier. That same year, the number of doctors registered in the South American country totaled about ******* professionals, most of them based in São Paulo.

Density of physicians (per 10 000 population) for African Countries

  Dataset Description

This dataset contains 'Density of physicians (per 10 000 population)' data for all 54 African countries, sourced from the World Health Organization (WHO). The data is structured with years as rows and countries as columns, facilitating time-series analysis. The data is measured in: per 10 000 population. Missing values have been handled using linear interpolation followed by forward… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/electricsheepafrica/Density-Of-Physicians-Per-10-000-Population-for-African-Countries.

As of 2023, roughly one in 15 active physicians in the United States were Hispanic (regardless of race). Asians were overrepresented, accounting for nearly one in 5 physicians in the U.S., while Asians made up just 6.3 percent of the total U.S. population.

BackgroundGrowing physician maldistribution and population demographic shifts have contributed to large geographic variation in healthcare access and the emergence of advanced practice providers as contributors to the healthcare workforce. Current estimates of geographic accessibility of physicians and advanced practice providers rely on outdated “provider per capita” estimates that have shortcomings.PurposeTo apply state of the art methods to estimate spatial accessibility of physician and non-physician clinician groups and to examine factors associated with higher accessibility.MethodsWe used a combination of provider location, medical claims, and U.S. Census data to perform a national study of health provider accessibility. The National Plan and Provider Enumeration System was used along with Medicare claims to identify providers actively caring for patients in 2014 including: primary care physicians (i.e., internal medicine and family medicine), specialists, nurse practitioners, and chiropractors. For each U.S. ZIP code tabulation area, we estimated provider accessibility using the Variable-distance Enhanced 2 step Floating Catchment Area method and performed a Getis-Ord Gi* analysis for each provider group. Generalized linear models were used to examine associations between population characteristics and provider accessibility.ResultsNational spatial patterns of the provider groups differed considerably. Accessibility of internal medicine most resembled specialists with high accessibility in urban locales, whereas relative higher accessibility of family medicine physicians was concentrated in the upper Midwest. In our adjusted analyses independent factors associated with higher accessibility were very similar between internal medicine physicians and specialists–presence of a medical school in the county was associated with approximately 70% higher accessibility and higher accessibility was associated with urban locales. Nurse practitioners were similar to family medicine physicians with both having higher accessibility in rural locales.ConclusionsThe Variable-distance Enhanced 2 step Floating Catchment Area method is a viable approach to measure spatial accessibility at the national scale.

In 2023, the United States had an average of *** physicians per 100,000 population. This varied widely by state. The ******************** had the highest physician density, followed by *************, ********, and ********* On the other hand, ***** had the lowest number of active licensed physicians per population, followed by ************

Sports medicine services, once perceived as a luxury for elite athletes, have gained broad public acceptance, become more accessible and have grown over the past five years. The increased participation in sporting activities, higher insurance coverage over the past decade and a steady improvement in consumers' ability to spend on services have boosted revenue. The pandemic challenged the industry for a short period, disrupting the athletic calendar and forcing many individuals to postpone treatment, dampening revenue growth in 2020. However, strength in insurance coverage and some years of per capita disposable income growth increased funds for services. Over the past five years, revenue has been growing at a CAGR of 3.0% and is expected to reach $38.2 billion in 2025. This includes an estimated 1.3% increase in 2025. Profit is set to slump to 15.4% of revenue in 2025, up from 14.8% in 2020. Sports medicine practitioners have implemented several methods to meet competition and boost profit. To combat high wage costs, offices have used more assistants and aides, who make up a significantly smaller fraction of sports medicine practitioners' wages. In addition, many practitioners have been combining services with other physicians to reduce service costs and ease the effects of escalating competition. Group purchase agreements allow practitioners to prevent supply shortages and negotiate better terms with critical equipment suppliers. To differentiate services and compete with DIY, some practitioners will join online platforms and encourage medical wearables that support some personal autonomy but that provide essential follow-up data for diagnosis. The focus on healthy lifestyles and increased information on the benefits of recreation and sports will spur sports participation and recreation and, as a result, a need for services. The pace of growth will continue to depend on the rising prices for insurance and costs that inhibit individuals' ability to pay, along with higher wages and technology costs that practitioners will look to pass on to maintain profit. However, the extraordinary pace of innovations in the field may spur mergers and acquisitions of smaller practices as larger organizations can purchase and train the next generation of sports medicine doctors on the new techniques. Overall, revenue is forecast to strengthen at a CAGR of 2.0% to $42.2 billion through the end of 2030.