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Industry

Trends, technology and the transformation of healthcare and long-term care, with analysis of workforce shortages, working flexibility and applied AI tools.

Here we look at the sector with public data and named sources: how many professionals there are, how many actually practise, how fast each profession is growing, and what is changing in the way work gets organised.

Being registered and being in practice are not the same thing

This is the distinction that changes a conversation about staff shortages the most. For 2023 the Spanish statistical office counted 346,207 registered nurses in Spain, while Eurostat, which counts only those practising, recorded 284,232 in the same year. That is a gap of roughly 62,000 professionals, around 18 %.

The practical consequence is that the register and the available pool are not the same figure, and planning with the first one means assuming a margin that does not exist.

Nursing is the largest group and one of the slowest growing

According to the INE register of licensed health professionals, Spain had 358,036 registered nurses in 2025, 34.5 % of all registered health professionals and a rate of 7.22 per 1,000 inhabitants. It is the largest group in the system.

And it grew by 1.2 % that year, the slowest rate of the last five, against 9.2 % for occupational therapists, 8.6 % for clinical psychologists and 4.7 % for physiotherapists. It is also ageing: 11.4 % were 65 or older in 2025, against 7.7 % in 2016.

What is changing in how work gets organised

Three things at once, and they are worth keeping apart. Flexibility, which in healthcare management does not mean improvising but having structured planning plus defined mechanisms to absorb variation. Artificial intelligence, which in this field applies to staff coordination and not to clinical decisions. And legal duties around rest time, which bound which cover models are sustainable.

We write about all three with the sources in view, because this is a field where claims with no data behind them are plentiful.

Articles about the sector