Where has for-profit hospital bed capacity grown most since 2010?
Where has for-profit hospital bed capacity grown the most in recent years? To answer this we look at OECD data on hospital bed capacity in 26 countries between 2010 and 2021.
Romania is the country which has seen the largest expansion in the number of for-profit hospital beds. Between 2010 and 2021, its for-profit bed capacity grew by factor of 3.6. This was by far the biggest growth out of the 26 countries. The second biggest expansion was in Bulgaria, where for-profit bed capacity grew by a factor of just under 2.5. However, Romania’s for-profit bed capacity grew from a small base, starting at just 2,767 in 2010 (compared to 5,822 in Bulgaria).
One slightly surprising feature of the above graph is how many countries have seen a fall in their for-profit hospital bed capacity. Nine out of the 26 countries had a lower number of for-profit beds in 2021 than in 2010. Three countries saw particularly large decreases: Poland saw a 25% decrease, Estonia saw a 46% decrease and Finland saw a 59% decrease.
These decreases are not purely down to countries nationalising for-profit hospitals: all of the countries that saw significant decreases in their for-profit hospital bed capacity also saw significant decreases in their total (including public and not-for-profit) bed capacity.
Looking at how for-profit bed capacity as a percentage of total bed capacity has changed between 2010 and 2021, the figures for most of the 26 countries are relatively stable. This suggests that in most countries for-profit hospital bed capacity tends to grow or fall along with (although not necessarily totally in line with) total hospital bed capacity. However, there are some exceptions to this. Most notably, Colombia saw its percentage of for-profit beds grow a whopping 16.7 percentage points, reaching 47.5% in 2020 (no data was available for 2021). This meant that by 2020 it had by far the largest proportion of for-profit beds out of the 26 countries. Bulgaria’s proportion of hospital beds saw the second biggest percentage point growth, of 14.5 percentage points, and Italy saw the third biggest increase, of eight percentage points.
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