Private clinics account for over 76% of primary health care consultations in 2025

[Photo: Renato Marques]

Private clinics accounted for more than three million consultations last year, representing 76.3% of all consultations at primary health care establishments in 2025.

According to a statistics release from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), the 767 primary health care establishments in Macau, including public health centers and private clinics, served some 3,940,000 people, with public facilities responsible for only 23.7% (932,000) of those.

In total, private clinics handled 3,008,000 consultations of various kinds, accounting for more than two-thirds of the market’s demand.

The same statistics also note that last year, demand in the health industry grew slightly in terms of patient numbers, while medical staff remained stable.

At the end of 2025, there were 2,055 registered physicians, 707 Chinese medicine doctors/Chinese herbalists, 288 dentists/odontologists and 3,039 nurses in Macau.

The numbers of physicians (3.0), Chinese medicine doctors/Chinese herbalists (1.0), dentists/odontologists (0.4) and nurses (4.4) per 1,000 population remained broadly unchanged from 2024 levels, DSEC remarked.

As for the number of recipients of hospital services (outpatient, emergency, inpatient and surgical operation services), it totaled 2,474,000, with 1,966,000 outpatient service recipients, 429,000 emergency service recipients, 58,000 inpatient service recipients and 22,000 surgical operation service recipients.

Among outpatient service recipients, consultations in physiotherapy and rehabilitation predominated (271,000; 13.8% of total), followed by Chinese medicine (262,000; 13.3%).

Regarding inpatient beds provided by the six hospitals in Macau, the total increased by 103 year over year to 1,882, following the commissioning of inpatient beds at the Islands Healthcare Complex – Macao Medical Center of Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

The occupancy rate of inpatient beds in local hospitals stood at 72.8% in 2025, up 1.3 percentage points year over year.

As forecast by authorities, demand for medical services in Macau tends to increase as the population ages, while the government is also aiming to attract visitors to Macau for medical tourism – one of its efforts to diversify the local economy and one of the main roles recently assigned to the Islands Healthcare Complex in Cotai.