a seriesPhysicians per 1,000 people
also: SH.MED.PHYS.ZS · doctors per 1,000 · physician density
The trade quotes it as doctors per thousand, usually without the year, and usually against a country it has already decided about.
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 generalist and specialist medical practitioners." In the fetch on this disk 194 codes carry a value, and the year behind each differs — 104 stand at 2022, 58 at 2023, and the Isle of Man's at 2010.
The story Inference
The series is a headcount over a population, and both halves move. A country that trains doctors and loses them to emigration counts them in the country they practise in, not the country that paid for the degree; a country that imports them counts them too. The ratio is arithmetic on two national totals and holds no information about where inside the country anybody works.
Inference — that is the gap a reader of this site walks into. Thailand stands at 0.54 physicians per 1,000 in 2021 and India at 0.72 in 2020, and both sell surgery to foreigners; Germany stands at 4.53 in 2022 and imports almost nobody. The private hospitals a foreign patient actually reaches sit in a handful of districts of a handful of cities, and a national ratio cannot see a district. Cuba, at 9.54 in 2021, is the highest value in the series and describes a state medical workforce, not a market.
How it works Harvested · wb-physicians
Fetched by tools/harvest_worldbank.py from the World Bank indicator API, no key, values from 2010 onwards, the most recent non-null year kept per country with the year stored beside the value.
Notes
Thirty of the 194 codes will not colour on this site's map. Twenty-four are the Bank's own aggregates, which arrive on the same endpoint with two-letter codes that look like country codes and are not — High income (XD), OECD members (OE), Sub-Saharan Africa (ZG), European Union (EU). The other six are real countries the 1:110m outline file has no polygon for: Monaco, San Marino, Maldives, St Kitts and Nevis, Nauru, Tuvalu. Country counts on this page were re-read on 17 September 2026, after the harvest started dropping the World Bank's own aggregates — income groups, regions, the euro area — which arrive on the same endpoint wearing two-letter codes. One of them, XN, is "Lower middle income" at the Bank and northern Cyprus on this site's map.
The particulars
| publisher | World Bank |
|---|---|
| region | Everywhere |
| publisher | World Bank Open Data, from WHO Global Health Workforce Statistics, the OECD, and country data |
| unit | physicians per 1,000 people |
| indicator | SH.MED.PHYS.ZS |
| years | 2010 to the most recent reporting year, which differs by country |
| countries | 194 |
| license | CC BY 4.0 |
| updated by publisher | annually, as WHO and OECD workforce returns arrive |
| 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. |
| links | World Bank indicator page · WHO health workforce data |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- Physicians (per 1,000 people) — indicator SH.MED.PHYS.ZS — World Bank Open Data · link (read 2026-09-17)
- World Bank Open Data — health and tourism indicators — The World Bank · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Health workforce — Global Health Observatory theme — World Health Organization · link (read 2026-09-17)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.