Lorraine Williamson
The shortage of nurses in Spain is increasing: 123,000 nurses are needed to reach the European average. Spain is light years behind neighbouring countries.
The number of nurses in Spain lags behind compared to the rest of Europe, with a figure of 6.3 professionals per thousand inhabitants. That is, 123,000 fewer than would be needed to reach the figure in neighbouring countries.
Spain’s General Council of Nurses (CGE) has warned that Spain needs around 123,000 nurses to reach the average number of professionals per capita in European countries. This figure has been increased from the previous data available, which stated that 95,000 were needed.
“We are light years behind our neighbouring countries”, reported the president of the General Council of Nursing, Florentino Pérez Raya. She said this on Monday during the presentation of the new study on ‘The situation of the nursing profession. Human Resources Report. 2023’. “The shortage of nurses has been an issue in Spain for years. With large differences at the regional level, in Navarre the deficit is twice as high as in Murcia”.
Research
The report presents the figures for the profession in Spain in the year 2023, including data on the number of nurses in relation to the population by community and province, the need for nurses to reach the average data for European countries. It also includes information about future retirements.
Number of nurses
As the study highlights, there are 345,000 nurses in Spain. Of those, 77% work in hospitals, 19% in primary health care, 1.8% in specialised training, and 1.5% in emergency care.
Spain has a ratio of 6.3 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants. At the European level, the ratio is 8.83 per 1,000 inhabitants. “There are still politicians who doubt this figure, I would just like to tell them to go to any health centre in our country and ask the managers to find no nurses,” said the secretary general of the General Council of Nursing, Diego Ayuso.
Shortage
Based on this data, the CGE considers that 122,993 nurses are needed, 40% more than the 345,000 currently in Spain. “Our country ranks sixth out of 21 EU countries. There are places like Norway (ratio 21.68), Austria and Iceland that have three times as many professionals as Spain,” Ayuso added.
He specified that “there is a shortage of professionals in all areas of care”, but above all “in primary care we need to double the number to be able to adopt a comprehensive approach to care in the family and in the community”.