Iceland Curative Care Hospital Beds per 100,000 (2023)
Iceland curative care hospital beds: 211.3 per 100,000 in 2023, down 4.1% from 2022. Annual series, 2007-2023, Eurostat (HLTH_RS_BDS1).
Data
| Year | per 100,000 inhabitants | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 211.3 | -4.1% |
| 2022 | 220.4 | -2.6% |
| 2021 | 226.3 | -2.3% |
| 2020 | 231.7 | +1.7% |
| 2019 | 227.7 | -1.6% |
| 2018 | 231.4 | -4.2% |
| 2017 | 241.5 | -1.7% |
| 2016 | 245.7 | +1.2% |
| 2015 | 242.9 | +0.2% |
| 2014 | 242.3 | -0.1% |
| 2013 | 242.6 | -0.2% |
| 2012 | 243.1 | +1.8% |
| 2011 | 238.9 | -9.0% |
| 2010 | 262.5 | -1.7% |
| 2009 | 266.9 | -2.8% |
| 2008 | 274.5 | -6.0% |
| 2007 | 292.2 | n/a |
About this Dataset
Iceland reported 211.3 curative care hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, down 4.1% from 220.4 the year before and the lowest reading in the 2007–2023 series. The count has fallen in twelve of the past sixteen years, from a peak of 292.2 in 2007 to 211.3 in 2023 — a decline of 80.8 beds per 100,000 population. The trajectory has been gradual rather than a single policy shock, interrupted by a sharp 9.0% one-year drop in 2011 and a brief 1.7% increase in 2020.
"Curative care beds" is a narrower Eurostat category than "hospital beds" — it excludes psychiatric, long-term and rehabilitative care beds, so the two figures are not interchangeable and a search for one routinely surfaces the other. Iceland's population is also small enough that a modest change in the absolute bed count moves the per-100,000 ratio more than it would in a larger country, so year-to-year swings here carry more noise than the equivalent series for Germany or France.
The series is published by Eurostat under its harmonised hospital resources framework. Key methodology points for anyone building this into a model:
- Unit: Curative (acute) care hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants
- Definition: Beds intended for patients whose main need is short-term treatment aimed at a cure, under Eurostat's care-function classification — excludes psychiatric, long-term and rehabilitative beds
- Coverage: Iceland, 2007–2023, 17 annual observations
- Source series: Eurostat HLTH_RS_BDS1 (Hospital beds by type of care)
- Publisher: Eurostat, European Commission
- Frequency: Annual, typically published with a lag of several months after the reference year
For an analyst tracking healthcare capacity, the direction matters more than any single year's print. Iceland has shed curative bed capacity in most years for over a decade and a half, a pattern shared across most of the countries Eurostat tracks under this series as national health systems shift care toward outpatient and day-case treatment. The defining feature is the consistency of the decline: aside from 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2020, every year in the series posted a lower count than the one before it.
The 2020 increase — the only meaningful year-over-year gain since 2016 — coincides with the pandemic response, when curative bed capacity was temporarily protected or expanded across much of Europe before the series resumed its downward path the following year. Analysts modelling healthcare infrastructure, staffing ratios or hospital-sector capital spending in Iceland should treat this series as a capacity constraint rather than a demand measure: a shrinking bed count against a stable or growing population points toward rising occupancy pressure, which typically shows up first in health expenditure per capita and only later in bed-count statistics like this one.
Related data: Finland curative care beds · Germany curative care beds · Italy curative care beds · Netherlands curative care beds · Europe hospital beds by country · Iceland health expenditure per capita · Europe physicians by country · Europe nurses by country