Patients per Doctor: Oz ain’t brilliant

From the always interesting Strange Maps site comes a map of the world made up of patient/doctor ratios, which you can see here.

Australia, at 400:1 (almost the same as the US, and the same figure as Kirgizstan), is only a middle-ranker, with Cuba as the best (170:1, indeed with an army of thousands of doctors giving foreign aid), the two-hundreds including ex-Soviets and even Turkmenistan, the Nordics in the low 300s.  China is pretty low (950), while each Tanzanian doctor "covers" 50,000 patients.

Yes, patient/doctor or doctor/patient ratios aren’t the only thing in providing decent health care – or indeed well-being, but it’s interesting that we have relatively few doctors, and even our nurses are so undercompensated many go and work overseas.

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See Also

• UN HDP Stats
• Human Development Index (wikipedia)
• HDI Calculator
• "If Only Castro Had Run The World…" (2007-03-11) gives comparative data on sustainability, health, literacy, etc, and how efficiently different nations turn dollars into well-being.