Juliette Gagliardi
Junior Researcher
Healthcare professionals in Italy - Statistics & Facts
In Italy, roughly 1.5 million people work in public and private healthcare facilities. Over 650 thousand individuals are employed in Italian hospitals, most as nurses and midwives, with 274,395 such workers. The number of physicians employed in hospitals in Italy reached almost 138.5 thousand in 2021 and, among them, 12.8 thousand were specialists in anesthesia and resuscitation. Among all physicians in the country, the biggest group is represented by general practitioners, followed by pediatricians and cardiologists. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people diagnosed with psychiatric illness increased, especially among young people, and although the number of psychiatrists grew by almost one thousand between 2012 and 2021, it has been estimated that there was a shortage of 10 thousand psychiatrists in 2023.
General practitioners
GPs in Italy provide primary care and act as gatekeepers in the Italian National Health Service (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale). In recent years, the lack of family doctors in Italy has been a topic of discussion. As a matter of fact, the number of general practitioners (GPs) in Italy decreased continuously over the past couple decades, dropping from 47 thousand in 2001 to 41.7 thousand in 2020. This shortage resulted in roughly two million people in Italy not having a family doctor, as of 2023. The reason behind this decrease is the gap between GPs starting to practice and the ones leaving the profession. This difference is estimated to increase up to nearly 19 thousand by 2028. Moreover, Italy stands slightly below the European average when it comes to the number of inhabitants per general practitioner, with 1,430 inhabitants per GP in Europe compared to 1,408 in Italy. In 2020, the density of GPS in Italy was 8.5 GPs per 10 thousand inhabitants.Nurses
The number of nurses employed by the National Health Service in Italy fluctuated slightly between 2012 and 2019 when almost 268.3 thousand nurses were employed by the NHS. The density rate of nurses over this period was constant, at 4.4 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants. As of 2019, regional variations could be observed across the country. In Trentino-South Tyrol, for example, the density rate was the highest at 6.4 per 1,000 inhabitants, while the lowest density was in Campania, with 3.3 nurses per per 1,000 inhabitants. As in the case of family doctors, in 2020 there was also a shortage of nurses, with an estimated deficit of 50 thousand nurses across the country.
