16 Countries that Produce the Best Nurses

Published on March 13, 2023 at 2:21 pm by Ramish Cheema in Lists, News

In this piece, we will take a look at the 16 countries that produce the best nurses. For more countries, head on over to 5 Countries that Produce the Best Nurses.

Nursing is one of the more important and underrated industries in the healthcare sector. While most attention, particularly in America, is often focused on doctors and the high fees that they pay for medical school only to make high salaries in an expensive healthcare system, nurses are the backbone of any hospital. While a doctor’s job is to diagnose a patient, it’s the nurses that are involved in taking care of sick people and ensuring that the treatments prescribed by the doctors are actually administered.

At the same time, it’s not easy to become a nurse. In fact, according to the American Nurses Association, there are several qualifications that are required to become a nurse and become eligible to sit for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX)-RN. These range from a simple diploma to a two year associate’s degree, or a four year bachelor’s degree. Yet, this isn’t the end of nursing education, as those interested can even pursue postgraduate programs such as a Master’s or even a Ph.D. These varying levels of education also result in different kinds of nurses, with each having a fixed set of educational qualifications. These include simple Registered Nurses who perform simple exams and administer medications, Licensed Practical Nurses who check for vital signs and ensure patient comfort, and Advanced Practical Registered Nurses who are required to hold a Master’s degree and can prescribe medication, administer anesthesia, and provide gynecological care.

Within the industry itself, the job requirements are changing as well. Gone are the days when a nurse could only take your blood pressure and ensure that your bedding was comfortable and your medication was timely administered. Now, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while there is no entry level education required to become a nursing assistant or an orderly, with the annual median pay being a rather low $30,290, the demand for Nurse Anesthetists, Nurse Midwives, and Nurse Practitioners, as well as their salary, is booming. The agency outlines that on a median level, an anesthetist, midwife, or nursing practitioner made a cool $123,780 per year in 2021. At the same time, the minimum entry level education required for this career is a master’s degree, and more importantly, there is a severe shortage of these practitioners since while the average rate of job growth for the healthcare sector is 5%, for nursing specialists, the growth rate is nearly eight times this as it is expected to sit at a strong 40% between 2021 and 2031, with 118,600 jobs added over the forecasted period. If you’re curious about the job market for Registered Nurses, the BLS outlines that, on the median, a registered nurse made $77,600 annually in 2021 and the field requires a bachelor’s degree as its entry level education.

Building on this, the National Academy of Medicine points out that advances in the nursing sector have also transformed hospitals’ ability to manage their daily tasks and improve the quality of patient services. It reveals that some changes that good quality nurses have helped with are reducing the time duration of hospital stays, decreasing physician workload, improving healthcare access for the underprivileged, providing greater access to specialty care, and enabling a greater role of technology within hospitals. These changes have also been spurred by the growing role of technology in nearly every sector, with nurses now playing a crucial role in informatics across intra hospital workflow management, by pursuing jobs such as informatics manager, informatics analyst, clinical analyst, and nursing and clinical informatics specialist.

Finally, in terms of monetary value, Data Bridge Market Research believes that the nursing care market was worth $1.1 billion in 2021 and will grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5% between then and 2029 to sit at $1.79 billion by the end of the forecast period. This growth will be driven by a larger chunk of the elderly population, as well as severe health disorders among the elderly.

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Our Methodology

We used Quacquarelli Symonds’s (QS) list of the world’s top nursing universities to pick out which countries have the best nurses. After all, a quality practical education is synonymous with quality practitioners. We scanned the QS university ranking for nursing schools covering the top 75 institutions, to sift out countries with the most top quality universities. In case of a tie, the universities’ H-index Citation scores were used, and if the tie persisted, then the employer reputation of their graduates was relied upon to finalize the list. The H-index is a useful tool for evaluating quality since it measures the citational impact of an institution’s research and removes uncited papers in determining rankings.