Medical Graduates Per 100,000 Population (2017): 14.5
Nursing Graduates Per 100,000 Population (2017): 21.7
Percent Share of Foreign-Trained Doctors (2017): 9.4%
Percent Share of Foreign-Trained Nurses (2017): 2.1%
(Note: According to OECD, “Medical graduates are defined as students who have graduated from medical schools in a given year.” OECD also notes that data for Austria “include foreign graduates, but other countries may exclude them.”)

Source: OECD (2019), Health at a Glance 2019: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/4dd50c09-en.

“A longstanding issue in medical education and training policies in Spain is that the number of medical graduates greatly exceeds the number of available postgraduate specialty training places to allow new graduates to complete their training. This issue highlights the need to improve planning and the criteria for educational authorities to open medical schools, as well as the need for autonomous communities to improve planning and funding of postgraduate training places.

“As a step to reduce the gap between the number of new medical graduates and the number of specialty training places, the number of training places will increase by about 12 % in 2020 (close to 1,000 additional places in absolute numbers), and a particular focus will be on increasing the number
of places in family and community medicine, in response to concerns about shortages of primary care doctors.”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2019), Spain: Country Health Profile 2019, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

“There are growing concerns about shortages of doctors in the near future, as more than one-third of doctors in Spain in 2017 were aged over 55 and can therefore be expected to retire in the coming years. These concerns are not new and led to a substantial increase in the number of students admitted to medical schools between 2006 and 2010. However, after the economic crisis, the Ministry of Health, Consumption and Social Welfare called for a reduction in the number of students admitted to medical schools in 2012, following the results of a medical workforce planning exercise that projected some surpluses of doctors. These projection results reflected the reality at that time that a growing number of newly trained doctors were unemployed or migrating to other countries. However, in recent years, the main concerns have reverted to shortages.”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2019), Spain: Country Health Profile 2019, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

“Since 2010, a significant change of health personnel training was debated and has materialized in the RD 639/2014, affecting postgraduate medical internship programmes and regulating nurses’ specialization. Unlike the current system, with 46 medical specialties having separate medical internship programmes, the reform sought to establish a common 2-year training programme for postgraduate trainees before splitting into subspecialties for most of the medical specialties. This reform aimed to provide a common holistic base of knowledge for all health professionals in a way that improves their response to their patients’ complexity, mitigating care fragmentation and overcoming the current silo mentality that impedes flexibility in human resources management. The reform raised much controversy as some medical specialties were strongly opposed to entering the core modules of the medical or surgical specialties. The reform process has ended up in the courts of justice with a Supreme Court ruling declaring the RD 639/2014 void, leaving the current previous legislation in place (see section 5.2 in GarcíaArmesto et al., 2010).”

Source: Bernal-Delgado E, García-Armesto S, Oliva J, Sánchez Martínez FI, Repullo JR, PeñaLongobardo LM, Ridao-López M, Hernández-Quevedo C. Spain: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 2018;20(2):1–179.

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

Page last updated May 16, 2021 by Doug McVay, Editor.