Which Countries Have The Most Hospital Beds? Hint: It’s Not The Ones You’d Expect
Note from the Editor: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in which they share their work and thought process. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
What makes a country’s health care system good or bad?
Is it efficiency? The quality of care provided? The country’s contributions to medical research? The sheer number of people it is able to treat?
There are so many metrics to look at, from the total amount of money that a country spends on health care to the overall health of its population.
This spring, I’m taking a course on data journalism with Miguel Paz at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Throughout the semester, one of our assignments was to find a publicly available data set, then clean it, sort it, analyze it, flip it and reverse it, and present our findings to fellow classmates.
After poking around on the World Bank Data Portal — a phenomenal resource for journalists––I found a data set that collects the number of hospital beds in each country around the world.
It struck me as odd: how and why would you count the total number of hospital beds in a country? I decided to have a look.
It was a big, messy data set: the numbers went back to the 1960s and the data was often incomplete.
I stuck with data from 2010 because it was the most recent data that was complete enough to be usable.
The results were not what I expected.
In 2010, the top 10 countries with the most hospital beds per capita were:
- North Korea
- Belarus
- Ukraine
- Russia
- Germany
- Austria
- Turkmenistan
- Kazakhstan
- Hungary
- Lithuania
Notice: many of these countries used to be — and in some cases still are — communist regimes.
Because the data set included standardized country codes, I was able to easily make a choropleth map using Datawrapper. The countries that are greyed out on the map had no available data.
Against all odds, North Korea — a country that isn’t known for treating its residents particularly well — topped the list with an average of 14 hospital beds for every 1000 people.
Of course, that result should be taken with a grain of salt.
Measuring the number of hospital beds in North Korea, a country that is largely sealed off from the rest of the world, is surely a difficult — if not impossible––task.
North Korea hasn’t released detailed data on its economy since the 1960s, and it stopped releasing absolute figures altogether in the early 2000s, providing vague percent changes by economic sector instead, according to Bloomberg.
Getting data from North Korea is like trying to figure out what your next door neighbor is doing through closed blinds.
Some of the most accurate data we have on North Korea today is gathered in South Korea using admittedly unreliable methods, such as observing the smoke that emanates from North Korean chimneys from the border.
But putting North Korea aside, I decided it would be interesting to compare each country’s ranking for hospital beds per capita to its ranking for GDP per capita.
I quickly realized that the two measures were not closely correlated.
For example, despite ranking first for GDP per capita, North America placed 21st out of 25 regions for hospital beds per capita.
More shocking still: Qatar had the 4th highest GDP per capita in the world, but ranked 108th out of 135 countries for hospital beds per capita with 1.2 hospital beds per 1000 people.
As a caveat, the World Bank Data Portal specifies that “depending on the source and means of monitoring, data may not be exactly comparable across countries.”
But even if the data is only somewhat accurate, it does further confirm what economists have noted time and time again: it takes more than money to create an effective health care system.
