Brussels, 09/06/2004 (Agence Europe) - In its recent publication OECD Health Data 2004, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states that health expenditure has seen a sharp rise in most of its 30 Member States over the last five years, from 7.5% to 8.5% of GDP on average between 1997 and 2002. In the United States, healthcare expenditure has grown 2.3 times faster than GDP, from 13% of GDP in 1997 to 14.6% in 2002. In other countries belonging to the international organisation, healthcare expenditure has increased 1.7 times as much as economic activity. In terms of outlay per head of population, the OECD states that expenditure on healthcare reached 5,267 dollars in the United States in 2002, which is practically 140% higher than the average for the OECD zone (2,144 dollars), and around ten times higher than in countries such as Mexico (553 dollars) and Turkey (446 dollars).
The OECD member countries spend on average just 2.8% of the total of healthcare spending on public and private prevention programmes. The current and future lack of healthcare professionals, which could have a negative impact on access to and quality of healthcare, is also of concern for a growing number of OECD countries. Eco-Health 2004 reveals enormous differences in the number of doctors and nurses per head of population in different countries. Medical density goes from less than 2 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants in Korea, Mexico and Turkey, to over 4 per 1,000 inhabitants in Greece and Italy.
OECD Health Data 204 also stresses problems of weight problems and obesity have grown worse in all OECD countries over the last two decades, due to poor eating habits and lack of physical activity.
OECD Health Data 2004, the most complete source of comparable data on health and healthcare systems in the 30 OECD Member States, is available on CD-Rom, in a multilingual version (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian) for a single user, or for a network installation. (Info: http://www.oecd.org ).