Three Out of Four New Doctors in Switzerland Now Come From Abroad

BERN - Switzerland's health system is being staffed, to a growing degree, by people who earned their medical degrees somewhere else. According to the Swiss Medical Association, 43 percent of doctors practising in Switzerland in 2025 held a foreign diploma, up from 31 percent ten years earlier. Among newly arriving physicians the dependence is starker still: three out of four now come from abroad, against an OECD average of around 19 percent.

The trend is the arithmetic of a bottleneck. Swiss universities have not produced enough doctors to replace retiring cohorts and to serve a growing, ageing population, and the gap is filled from abroad, above all from Germany and other European neighbours whose degrees are recognised under long-standing agreements.

A political file that never quite closes

How many doctors Switzerland trains, and who pays for it, has been argued over in Bern for years, from the numerus clausus at medical schools to the funding of postgraduate training places. The new figures arrive while households are absorbing another rise in costs, with health premiums set to climb about 5 percent in 2027, and they hand fresh ammunition to those who want training capacity expanded rather than rationed.

There is also a quieter risk embedded in the numbers. A system that recruits heavily abroad is exposed to the labour markets of its neighbours, and to the political mood about migration that shapes whether those recruits can settle. The Senate's demand last week that EU citizens who become unemployed lose the right to apply for settlement, now drawing warnings from Brussels, touches the very pool of workers the health system depends on.

What the medical association wants

The medical association has long argued that Switzerland should train more of its own doctors instead of importing the shortfall, a position shared across party lines in principle and disputed in price. With the winter session due to open on 30 November, the workforce question is one more health file competing for space with premium relief and hospital funding.