Nurses are defined as all the "practising" nurses providing direct health services to patients, including self-employed nurses. However, for some countries (France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Turkey and the United States), due to lack of comparable data, the figures...

This indicator presents the number of nursing graduates in a given year. In response to concerns about current or anticipated shortages of nurses, many OECD countries have taken steps in recent years to expand the number of students in nursing education programmes. Increasing investment in...

This paper argues that there is a need for competition agencies to become more active and effective advocates for the use of choice and competition in publicly funded healthcare markets. It suggests that the need for strong regulation will not shrink or disappear, as it might do in a utility,...