Matewis: Ah right yes that would make sense, and iirc those druid ladies had a lot of initiative, so they could usually remove all debuffs at the start of a round.
Initiative is actually quite an important stat for healers, and it turns out that, in a Wizardry/Dragon Quest-like battle system, it helps for initiative to be either high or low. A couple interesting examples:
* In Stranger of Sword City Revisited, the Clocker (which is more like a Red Mage, but more frontloaded) has two abilities that allows them to cast a spell twice at the beginning of the round, at the cost of not being able to do so next round. This is, needless to say, quite handy when combined with healing magic (especially if you multiclass to combine these abilities with more powerful spells).
* In SaGa 2, many late game bosses rely on being able to constantly heal the entire party. In this case, it helps for your healer to be *slow*, so that the enemy reliably acts before the party heal that heals the damage. (Reliably acting before the enemy is not possible because of a bug, unless you're playing the DS version that fixed that bug.) (Worth noting that this is *not* typical of the SaGa series; SaGa 2 and 3 are the only two games in the series where multi-target healing is readily available, with SaGa Frontier having rare skills that do so (usually at the cost of LP), and Romancing SaGa 3 having rare staves that can heal the party with a skill called Shatter Staff, and that's usually not practical because of the drawback that the name suggests.)
tremere110: You've got a lot of different options for healers in Pathfinder. There is a White Mage archetype of the Arcanist class that is essentially an arcane caster with spontaneous healing abilities. A Cleric is probably the better choice for healing in general since they can remove various debuffs as well as heal damage with most archetypes. A Witch has a nice mix of offense and healing in their spell list - and you can make one focused on healing by giving them a Healing or Mercy patron.
If you want someone who can excel at both combat and healing you won't go wrong with a Paladin - healing competently does come in at later levels though, not at the start. That healing is very strong though at high levels, able to heal a large amount of health as well as remove a lot of debuffs in a single use because of Mercy effects.
How many of these options are actually implemented in the computer games?