According to a report published this month by Eurostat and cited by News.ro, Romania ranks 19th among the 27 member states of the European Union in terms of the number of doctors. The rating is based on the number of working doctors per 100,000 population. In another report published by the EU statistical office, information on visits to doctors is given, where Romania was at the bottom of the ranking.

The latest figures show the situation in 2021, a year still marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced the ability of health systems to offer health services to ordinary patients.

Thus, in Romania, the average number of consultations per inhabitant was 4.9 in 2021, an increase compared to 2020 (an average of 4.6 consultations), but significantly below the level of 2019 (5.3 consultations), when there was no pandemic.

In this section, in 2021, Romania was in 17th place out of 27 member states, between Italy (5.3 consultations per inhabitant) and Luxembourg (4.8 consultations).

The most consultations were in Slovakia (11 consultations per inhabitant), Germany (9.6) and Hungary (9.5), and the least in Sweden (2.3), Greece (2.7) and Portugal (3, 5).

Eurostat data shows a decrease in the number of medical consultations in 2020 and 2021 in most EU countries, including Romania, due to the pandemic.

Official data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) show that the number of doctors – a category that does not include dentists – in Romania was 68,760 in 2021, which means about 360 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants.

There were 1.82 million active doctors in the EU in 2022, the majority of whom (377,000, equivalent to 21% of the total number of doctors in the EU) worked in Germany.

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