Benchmarking Health Infrastructure in Türkiye and Other OECD Countries: Health Workforce, Medical Technology and R&D Activities in Health

Abstract

As it has been seen during the COVID-19 pandemic period, medical technologies as well as the health personnel, especially the physicians (medical doctors) and nurses in health care resources played a crucial role in the early diagnosis and in the prevention of the disease. Advances in medical technologies allow the physicians and nurses to devote more time to patients and to deal with them in more detail.In OECD countries, total health and social employment was 67.2 million and 20% of them, which was 13.45 million, were practising nurses, 6.3% of them, which was 4.2 million, were practising physicians in 2021. According to the WHO, total global nursing health workforce is 28.9 million, whereas total physicians are 12.8 million in 2020. There were 36.7 “mammographs”, 7.6 “radiation therapy equipment”, 19.1 “gamma cameras”, 3.4 “positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, 35.7 “computed tomography (CT) scanners”, 25.1 “magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) units” per million population in OECD in 2021. Gross domestic expenditure share on research and development (R&D) in medical and health sciences in GDP was 0.56% and the share of patent publications in medical technology in total patent applications was 6.2% in OECD in 2021. Health expenditure per capita was 5,597dolar and health expenditure as a share of GDP was 13.2% in OECD in 2021. It seems that health expenditure and human resources are not at the same level in every country. In addition, foreign trade of technological medical devices used in the diagnosis of disease is not distributed equally, since the purchasing power due to economic growth is not the same and sufficient resources are not allocated for R&D expenditures. This study aims to investigate to benchmark the health infrastructure in Türkiye and other OECD countries considering the health workforce, medical technology and R&D activities in health.