Healthcare services in Europe

The dataset contains information on healthcare services considered hospitals by Member States. The definition varies slightly from country to country, but roughly includes the following:

Hospitals comprise licensed establishments primarily engaged in providing medical, diagnostic and treatment services that include physician, nursing and other health services to inpatients and the specialized accommodation services required by inpatients.

Usage

gisco_get_healthcare(
  year = c(2023, 2020),
  cache = TRUE,
  update_cache = FALSE,
  cache_dir = NULL,
  verbose = FALSE,
  country = NULL
)

Source

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/basic-services.

Arguments

year: A character string or numeric value with the release year of the file. One of 2023, 2020.
cache: A logical value indicating whether to cache results. Defaults to TRUE. See Caching strategies section in gisco_set_cache_dir().
update_cache: A logical value indicating whether to refresh the cached file. Defaults to FALSE. When set to TRUE, it forces a new download.
cache_dir: A character string with a path to a cache directory. See Caching strategies section in gisco_set_cache_dir().
verbose: A logical value indicating whether to display informational messages.
country: A character vector of country codes. It can be either a vector of country names, a vector of ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes or a vector of Eurostat country codes. See also countrycode::countrycode().

Value

A sf object.

Details

Files are distributed in EPSG:4326.

The following table describes the healthcare service attributes:

Attribute	Description
`id`	The healthcare service identifier, based on national identification codes when available.
`hospital_name`	The name of the healthcare institution.
`site_name`	The name of a specific site or branch of the healthcare institution.
`lat`	Latitude (WGS 84).
`lon`	Longitude (WGS 84).
`street`	Street name.
`house_number`	House number.
`postcode`	Postcode.
`address`	Address information when the different components of the address are not separated in the source.
`city`	City name. In some sources, this refers to a region or municipality.
`cntr_id`	Country code (2 letters, ISO 3166-1 alpha-2).
`emergency`	`yes` or `no`, indicating whether the healthcare site provides emergency medical services.
`cap_beds`	Measure of capacity by number of beds (most common).
`cap_prac`	Measure of capacity by number of practitioners.
`cap_rooms`	Measure of capacity by number of rooms.
`facility_type`	Type of healthcare service, such as psychiatric hospital, based on national classification.
`public_private`	Public or private status of the healthcare service.
`list_specs`	List of specialties recognized in the EU and EEA according to the 2005 EU Directive (Annex V).
`tel`	Telephone number.
`email`	Email address.
`url`	URL for the institution's website.
`ref_date`	The reference date (`DD/MM/YYYY`) for the data.
`pub_date`	The publication date of the dataset by Eurostat (`DD/MM/YYYY`).
`geo_qual`	Geolocation quality indicator: 1 = Good, 2 = Medium, 3 = Low, 4 = From source, -1 = Unknown, -2 = Not geocoded.
`comments`	Additional information on the healthcare service.

Copyright

The general Eurostat copyright and licence provisions apply. Detailed metadata also list source-specific licensing conditions by country and data provider. Review the conditions for the selected data before use.

Data quality

The data are extracted from official national registers. They may contain inconsistencies, inaccuracies and gaps due to the heterogeneity of the national input data.

Examples

health_benelux <- gisco_get_healthcare(
  country = c("BE", "NL", "LU"),
  year = 2023
)

# Plot if downloaded.
if (!is.null(health_benelux)) {
  benelux <- gisco_get_countries(country = c("BE", "NL", "LU"))

  library(ggplot2)
  ggplot(benelux) +
    geom_sf(fill = "grey10", color = "grey20") +
    geom_sf(
      data = health_benelux, color = "red",
      size = 0.2, alpha = 0.25
    ) +
    theme_void() +
    theme(
      plot.background = element_rect(fill = "black"),
      text = element_text(color = "white"),
      panel.grid = element_blank(),
      plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.5),
      plot.subtitle = element_text(face = "italic", hjust = 0.5)
    ) +
    labs(
      title = "Healthcare services", subtitle = "Benelux (2023)",
      caption = "Source: Eurostat, Healthcare 2023 dataset."
    ) +
    coord_sf(crs = 3035)
}