Europe

Health care services and systems are among the best in the world in Europe. Indeed, the World Health Organization ranked France and Italy as having the first and second best healthcare systems, respectively in the world at the start of the 21st century. While that may have changed in the past decade or so, in general, the European region ranks the highest on measures of healthcare system availability, efficacy, cost, and efficiency.

Europe has one of the highest concentrations of healthcare professionals in the world. For physicians, across the European region there is one doctor for every 332 people. This statistic is significantly higher than most countries in the America, for instance in the U.S. there is one doctor per 408 persons. Similarly, nurses and midwives are available at a ratio of 1:124 and hospital bed availability in countries such as Germany, France, and Italy is among the highest in the world.

Life expectancy is one of the clearest measures of just how effective a given country’s healthcare system is. If health problems are being addressed in a timely manner and if service quality is high, then life expectancy across the country should also be high. This is the case in Europe; half of the countries with the top ten highest life expectancies in the world are countries in the European region.

Finally, healthcare spending is moderately high across Europe; average healthcare spending was above $2,000 per capita in 2012. Systems with very high spending, the Netherlands’, for instance, have been criticized as not being cost-effective, while Italy’s spending has been deemed unsustainable. This is a direction for healthcare system improvements.