Hospital Beds Per Country Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

A market sizer scoping a medical-device or supply opportunity starts from care infrastructure: how many hospital beds a country operates, and which direction that stock is trending. Two named sources answer it. The World Bank Health Topic DataBank — the World Development Indicators Health topic, topic ID 8 in the World Bank API — enumerated 658 health indicators across 295 economies at research time, and carries the standard cross-country capacity series: hospital beds per 1,000 people under code SH.MED.BEDS.ZS. That beds panel alone spans 265 country and aggregate entities annually from 1960 to 2023, sourced mostly from WHO reporting that the Bank harmonizes and redistributes.

The WHO Global Health Observatory Data Repository is the complementary layer: 3,093 distinct indicator codes served over a public OData API covering 194 Member States, including WHOSIS_000004, hospital beds per 10,000 population. Both sit in Datadory's Health Care Supplies slice, where 7 of the 8 primary datasets are free and 6 of 8 expose official APIs — consistent with a catalog where 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access.

The REST API returns one observation object per country-year with indicator id and name, country id and value, an ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 countryiso3code, the date year, the numeric value, observation status and decimal precision. A verified live call returned United States values of 2.70 beds per 1,000 people for 2021 and 2.68 for 2022 — the latest non-null year for the US at research time. Nulls are routine rather than exceptional: recent country-years frequently return null because WHO reporting lags several years, and the sample response for Africa Eastern and Southern in 2020 was null too.

Beds pair naturally with spending series in the same topic. Current health expenditure as a share of GDP (SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS) verified at 16.69% for the United States in 2023 and 12.27% for Germany in 2024. Because every row carries countryiso3code and date, joining beds to expenditure, trade or production tables is a two-key merge with no cleaning layer in between.

Beds measure infrastructure, not equipment or supply capacity, so three companions complete a sizing model. Equipment intensity comes from WHO's medical devices indicators in the Global Health Observatory: DEVICES08 tracks MRI units per million population — the United States verified at 40.11 in 2019, flagged “OECD 2017-19” — and DEVICES09 covers CT units, with roughly 290-540 rows per indicator reaching about 143 countries for survey years 2010-2021.