Births Attended by Skilled Health Staff

Births attended by skilled health staff (%)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by UNICEF

We hold 23 editions of this indicator, from 1995 to 2019 — 2,407 rows in total, and 86 countries in the newest.

23 reference years (1995–2019), covering 80 to 145 countries, from UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children via the World Bank’s indicator API (SH.STA.BRTC.ZS). The share of births attended by a doctor, nurse or midwife — close to a single measure of whether a health system reaches women at the moment they most need it, and it pairs directly with under-five mortality beside it. ⚠ SURVEY-DRIVEN, so the country set changes from year to year: a country missing from an edition was not surveyed, and its care did not lapse. ⚠ Coverage thins sharply after 2019 (57 countries in 2020, 3 in 2022), so those years are not imported and the series ends earlier than the data appears to. ⚠ Many high-income countries sit at or near 100% and stop being distinguishable; the spread that matters is at the bottom. ⚠ These are not 23 published reports — see `restatedByReport`. ⚠ UNICEF does not rank countries on it. A POSITION is derived here (2026-09-10) by ordering the score. ⚠ IT OPENS WITH AN 11-WAY TIE: 11 countries report that every birth is attended and share position 1, and 86 countries hold only 45 distinct values, so this measure separates the countries that still have a problem far better than the ones that do not.