Health & Wellbeing
Nearly one in four doctors is near retirement age, WHO says
WHO said on October 19 that the world has more health workers, but they are unevenly spread and many doctors are near retirement.
On October 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it had published the first in a new yearly series of reports on the world's health workers. The report itself is dated June 22, 2026. It is based on official figures that countries send to WHO every year through a system called the National Health Workforce Accounts. The report shows how many health workers there are, where they work and how the picture has changed over the past two decades.
In some ways, the trend is encouraging. WHO tracks health workforce density, which counts doctors, nurses and midwives, dentists and pharmacists for every 10,000 people. Globally, this density rose from 44.8 in 2006 to 67.9 in 2025, an increase of 52 percent. According to WHO, there are now more than 70 million health and care workers worldwide.
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A situation in which there is not enough of something that people need.
Worldwide, the shortage of health workers is projected to reach 11.1 million by 2030.