Healthcare Resources in Switzerland

Switzerland

8’544’527
inhabitants

4.4 hospital beds
for 1000 inhabitants

2.26 doctors
for 1000 inhabitants

Click on the map to select a canton

What is the difference between the number of certified ICU beds at the beginning of the soft lockdown and the recent numbers listed by the Swiss Armed Force?

Does the number of resources grow with the number of inhabitants and canton's wealth?

One can imagine that the more inhabitants per canton, the more hospital beds and doctors. However, the correlation is not so clear. For instance, in the number of doctors, we observe a disparty between blue and red bubbles - where the reds represent the "rich" and the blues represent the cantons with a growth domestic product per capita (GDPpc) equal or below the average. In this case, the red slope is steeper than the blue one and can be interpreted as a more significative increase of resources per inhabitants for the rich cantons.

For both resources, Zürich and Basel-Stadt appear as outliers. Basel-Stadt, one of the business center of Switzerland with less than 200’000 inhabitants, has the biggest growth domestic product per capita and the more resources, with its numbers far above the other red cantons’s trend. Zürich on the other hand, with the biggest population in Switzerland, has a number of resources looking more similar to the blue trend despite its high growth domestic product per capita.

What is the gender repartition in healthcare practitioners ?

Between 1985 and 2005, 81% of women for only 19% of men obtained a diploma in healthcare. What is even more striking is the gender gap between high-paying jobs and less-paying jobs. Indeed, over ten years, 93% of woman studied to become caregivers, nurses and midwives, whereas only 38% received a diploma to become a dentist or a doctor. As salary equity is often used as an argument to show gender equality in an industry, the access to high-paying jobs should also be given for the sake of transparency; it still remains more difficult for women to access top-management postions and "prestigious" occupations. The following interactive dataviz entitles to show this disparity in healthcare studies. Note that in the dataset, gender was considered as a binary.