Care AbroadThe data (13)
Every series this site draws a chart from, what it counts, and the sentence about what it does not count.
What each series leaves out
| CDC assisted reproductive technology results | Counts. Every ART cycle performed at a reporting United States clinic in the calendar year — cycles, patients, transfers, live-birth deliveries and infants — reported clinic by clinic and nationally. National figures are noncumulative and cover only cycles performed in the reporting year. Does not count. Anything done outside a United States clinic. A US resident who travels to Mexico, Spain, Greece or the Czech Republic for IVF is outside the system entirely, and no American series counts them. It counts no intrauterine insemination and no ovulation induction, because neither is ART by CDC's definition; it counts nothing from the clinics listed as nonreporters, about 2% of cycles by CDC's own estimate; and its clinic rates describe cycles more than a year old, which the CDC says plainly should not be read as any individual's chance of success. |
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| Current health expenditure per person | Counts. Final consumption of health goods and services in a year: government schemes, compulsory insurance, voluntary insurance, and household out-of-pocket payments, divided by mid-year population. Does not count. Capital spending — a new hospital building does not appear. Nor does anything a foreign patient pays for treatment in that country, which is exactly the flow this site is about: a country can run a large export trade in surgery and show nothing for it here. |
| HFEA fertility treatment results | Counts. Every IVF and donor insemination cycle performed in a UK licensed clinic, with the patient's age band and the outcome, whoever the patient is and wherever they live. 107 clinics held a licence in 2023/24. Does not count. Treatment abroad. A UK resident who has IVF in Spain, Czechia or northern Cyprus leaves no trace in this register, because the clinic is not licensed by the HFEA — the one flow this directory exists to describe is the one the register is defined to exclude. It also holds no detailed information on partner intrauterine insemination, nothing on treatment outside licensed clinics, and nothing about surrogacy arrangements beyond the treatment cycle itself. Birth rates for the most recent year are preliminary, and the Authority changed how it calculates them, so figures are not comparable back through earlier reports. |
| Hospital beds per 1,000 people | Counts. Inpatient beds in public, private, general and specialised hospitals and rehabilitation centres, acute and chronic care in most cases, divided by mid-year population and multiplied by a thousand. Does not count. Whether a bed is staffed, equipped or empty. It counts no operating theatre, no intensive-care capability, no dialysis station and no day-case chair, and it draws no line between the public system a resident queues for and the private wing a foreign patient is admitted to. Forty-seven of the 220 country outlines this site draws carry no value at all — Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Namibia and South Sudan among them — and twenty-seven codes that carry a doctor count carry no bed count. Absence here is absence of a return, not absence of beds. |
| International arrivals | Counts. Arrivals of overnight visitors from abroad, or, where a country cannot report those, visitors — which takes in same-day crossings, cruise passengers and crew. Does not count. People. Each trip by the same person counts again, so the total is crossings, not travellers. Nothing in the series records why anybody came: there is no treatment field, no purpose field, and no way to separate a patient from a holidaymaker or a visiting relative. It counts nobody who crossed by land where a country reports air arrivals only — which removes most of the Mexican border dental trade — and nobody who did not appear at a border at all. |
| Natural Earth country outlines | Counts. National outlines: one row per country with an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, simplified for a screen-width map. Does not count. Anything about the people inside the outline. It is geometry, and it joins to the rest of this site only through a country code — so a place with no ISO alpha-2 code, or one too small to carry a polygon at this scale, silently drops out of every map and every chart. Northern Cyprus, Kosovo and Somaliland are here under codes this project invented for them; Monaco, Macau and the Vatican are not here at all. Disputed borders are drawn one way at one scale and are not a ruling on anything. |
| OECD waiting times for elective surgery | Counts. Waiting time for seven named elective procedures, for "all publicly-funded patients (including patients who have received the treatment either by publicly- or privately-owned providers)", reported either as the wait of patients treated or as the wait so far of patients still on the list at a census date. Does not count. The wait before the specialist. The clock starts after assessment, so the months between a family doctor's referral and a consultant's opinion are outside the series by definition. It counts no privately-funded patient, which removes the domestic private route that competes with travelling abroad. It counts no country that does not publish: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Türkiye and the United States are all marked data not available, and several of them are among the largest sources of patients travelling for planned surgery. And it counts nobody who left the list — died, gave up, went private, or flew somewhere else. |
| OpenStreetMap hospitals, clinics and dental surgeries | Counts. Points, ways and relations inside the radius that carry a name and one of the queried amenity or healthcare tags on the fetch date. Does not count. Anything nobody mapped. A hospital missing from this file is missing from OpenStreetMap, which is a fact about mappers and not about the city: absence here is absence of mapping. The rows carry no accreditation, no ownership, no price, no quality measure, no patient volume and no indication that a place treats foreigners — and a clinic that closed last year sits in the file until somebody edits it out. A name is not a licence: a row proves only that a point on a map once had that name typed on it. |
| Out-of-pocket share of health spending | Counts. Spending on health paid directly by households at the point of use — fees, co-payments, medicines bought over the counter — as a percentage of everything the country spends on health in the same year. Does not count. The amount. It is a ratio, and a poor country with a high share may pay less per household than a rich country with a low one; the amount sits in a separate series. It counts nothing a foreign patient pays for treatment in the country, which belongs to the other side of the account as an export. It does not separate a co-payment inside an insured system from a whole bill paid in cash, and it does not distinguish a payment made by choice from one made because nothing else was on offer. |
| Physicians per 1,000 people | Counts. Generalist and specialist medical practitioners registered as working in the country, divided by mid-year population and multiplied by a thousand. Does not count. Where the doctors are. A national ratio cannot separate the capital from the province, the private hospital from the district clinic, or the surgeon who operates on visitors from the physician who never sees one. It counts no nurse — that is a separate indicator — records no specialty, and holds no measure of what any of them do. Nothing in it distinguishes a doctor trained at home from one trained abroad, and nothing in it counts the foreign patients treated. |
| The dated exchange rate table | Counts. 166 currency codes with a mid-market rate against the US dollar on one stated date. Does not count. What a patient's bank charges. This is a mid-market rate on one day: it carries no card spread, no foreign-transaction fee, no cash-advance charge and no airport-counter margin, and it is not the rate on the day any price on this site was published. It holds no history, so an old price converted here is converted at a new rate and says nothing about what that patient's currency bought at the time. Several of its rates are administered pegs rather than traded prices — the UAE dirham sits at 3.6725 and the Saudi riyal at 3.75 — and nothing in the file marks which is which. |
| The JCI list of accredited organizations | Counts. Organizations that applied for JCI accreditation, paid for the survey, met the standards on the survey date, and are inside a three-year cycle. Does not count. Everybody who did not apply. This is a register of purchased inspections, so it maps who bought one rather than who is any good, and no hospital appears in it involuntarily. It carries no outcome data — no infection rate, no mortality, no revision rate — no price, no patient volume, and no record of a complaint. Nor does it show the lapsed: an accreditation that expired leaves a hospital's website long after it leaves the list, and the list itself keeps no public history of who used to be on it. |
| WHO Global Health Observatory | Counts. Health statistics for WHO Member States, most of them modelled to be comparable across countries and across time. Does not count. Anybody who crossed a border for treatment. No indicator in the repository counts a foreign patient, a treatment bought abroad, or a payment made in another country's health system. Its figures are also WHO estimates rather than national returns, so a value here may differ from the one the same country publishes at home — WHO says so itself — and it can change because the method changed rather than because anything happened. |
ExchangeRate-API (1)
rates.json, USD base rate table
One set of exchange rates, fetched once and stamped, so prices published in twenty-odd currencies can sit on a single axis.
HFEA (1)
Choose a Fertility Clinic, HFEA Register, Fertility treatment: trends and figures
What every licensed fertility clinic in the United Kingdom did, and what came of it.
Joint Commission International (1)
JCI accredited organizations directory, Gold Seal list
The directory of hospitals, clinics and programmes outside the United States currently holding Joint Commission International accreditation.
Natural Earth (1)
ne_110m_admin_0_countries, Admin 0 – Countries
The country shapes every map on this site is drawn with. Natural Earth's Admin 0 countries at 1:110 million, fetched once and simplified: 220 country rows, 357 rings, 6,571 coordinate pairs at two decimal places.
OECD (1)
DSD_HEALTH_PROC@DF_WAITING, waiting times for selected elective surgeries
How long patients wait for seven non-emergency operations in the countries that measure it. Part of OECD Health Statistics, published with a definitions document dated 10 September 2025.
OpenStreetMap (1)
OSM facilities harvest, Overpass hub query
Every named hospital, clinic and dental surgery OpenStreetMap carried within a set radius of each hub on this site, fetched through the Overpass API.
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1)
NASS, National ART Surveillance System, ART Success Rates
What every reporting fertility clinic in the United States did in a year, and what came of it.
World Bank (5)
SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD, health spending per capita
What a country spends on health in a year, divided by its population, in current US dollars. The World Bank republishes it from the WHO Global Health Expenditure Database.
SH.MED.BEDS.ZS, bed density
How many hospital beds a country has for every thousand residents.
ST.INT.ARVL, international tourist arrivals
How many international arrivals a country recorded in a year. The World Bank republishes it from UN Tourism's Yearbook and Compendium of Tourism Statistics.
SH.XPD.OOPC.CH.ZS, OOP share
What share of a country's health spending comes straight out of households' pockets, rather than from government schemes or insurance.
SH.MED.PHYS.ZS, doctors per 1,000, physician density
How many doctors a country has for every thousand residents. The World Bank republishes it from WHO Global Health Workforce Statistics, the OECD and country returns, under a one-line definition: "Physicians include…
World Health Organization (1)
GHO, GHO OData API
The World Health Organization's public statistics repository. In its own words, "The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States.