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Density of medical doctors (per 10,000 population), 2015-2023: 44.98
Density of nursing and midwifery personnel (per 10,000 population), 2016-2023: 121.86
Density of dentists (per 10,000 population), 2016-2023: 7.18
Density of pharmacists (per 10,000 population), 2015-2023: 5.81

Source: World health statistics 2025: monitoring health for the SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals. Tables of health statistics by country and area, WHO region and globally. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2025. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

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Hospital workforce per 1,000 population, 2021
– Physicians: 3.42
– Nurses and midwives: 7.4
– Healthcare assistants: 2.12
– Other health service providers: 5.4
– Other staff: 4.29
Practicing doctors per 1,000 population, 2021: 4.4
Share of different categories of doctors, 2021
– General practitioners: 18%
– Specialists: 43%
– Other doctors: 39%
Share of foreign-trained doctors, 2021: 9.5%
Medical graduates per 100,000 population, 2021: 22.0
Practicing nurses per 1,000 population, 2021: 10.2
Share of foreign-trained nurses, 2021: 1.8%
Nursing graduates per 100,000 population, 2021: 45.3
Ratio of nurses to doctors, 2021: 2.3
Practicing pharmacists per 100,000 population, 2021: 56
Community pharmacies per 100,000 population, 2021: 9
Remuneration of doctors, ratio to average wage, 2021
– Specialists
– Salaried: 2.5
Remuneration of hospital nurses, ratio to average wage, 2021: 1.1
Remuneration of hospital nurses, USD PPP, 2021: $65,000
Long-term care workers per 100 people aged 65 and over, 2021: 7.4
Share of informal carers among the population aged 50 and over, 2019
– Daily carers: 5
– Weekly carers: 9
Share of long-term care workers who work part time or on fixed contracts, 2021
– Part-time: 40%
– Fixed-term contract: 20.1%
Average hourly wages of personal care workers, as a share of economy-wide average wage, 2018
– Residential (facility-based) care: 83%
– Home-based care: 73%

Source: OECD (2023), Health at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, doi.org/10.1787/7a7afb35-en.

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“Despite having a relatively high number of practicing doctors and nurses per capita in Europe (Fig. 4.2), Denmark has a general shortage of health professionals, particularly among nurses and nurse assistants (health and social care assistants). There are also shortages within some medical specialties, among others, in psychiatry, radiology and among GPs and especially outside the larger cities. Furthermore, it is estimated that 1.8 million Danes live in so-called medically underserved areas with too few GPs (lægedækningstruede områder) (PLO, 2019a).

“The current staffing challenges are found mainly in anaesthesia departments, intensive care units, internal medicine units and operating rooms, for which all regions have vacant positions. However, depending on the situation, department and region, the challenges look different and have different degrees of complexity. The coalition government from 2022 launched an emergency package for the health care system in February 2023 to address the immediate challenges with increasing waiting times and staff shortages. The package includes a grant of DKK 2 billion (€268.2 million) to strengthen the incentives for extra work at the hospitals in the next 2 years. The government will also collaborate with the regions to enable the use of other types of staff, including medical students, retired health care staff and administrative staff to ease the pressure on doctors and nurses (so-called task shifting). Another initiative is to streamline and thus shorten the authorization process for foreign health care personnel.”

Source: Birk HO, Vrangbæk K, Rudkjøbing A, Krasnik A, Eriksen A, Richardson E, Smith Jervelund S. Denmark: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 2024; 26(1): i–152.

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“As noted in Section 4 (see Figure 11 above), Denmark has more doctors and nurses per 1,000 population than the EU averages. While the number of doctors and nurses relative to population size has increased over the past decade, the growth in the number of nurses has been more modest. The growth in doctors relative to population size has been solely among specialists, while the density of GPs has remained unchanged. As a result, the share of GPs among all doctors decreased from 21 % in 2010 to 18 % in 2020 (OECD, 2023a).

“In hospitals, staffing challenges in 2022 were mainly found among doctors in some specialty areas and specialist categories of nurses such as nurse anaesthetists, operating theatre nurses and intensive care nurses, with all regions having vacant positions in 2022 (Ministry of the Interior and Health, 2023a). Overall, in 2022, around 4,700 nursing positions were unfilled in hospitals. These workforce shortages have impeded the capacity to reduce the backlog of patients on waiting lists, and thereby to reduce waiting times for surgical interventions (see Section 5.3).”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2023), Denmark: Country Health Profile 2023, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

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World Health Systems Facts is a project of the Real Reporting Foundation. We provide reliable statistics and other data from authoritative sources regarding health systems and policies in the US and sixteen other nations.

Page last updated July 24, 2025 by Doug McVay, Editor.