Despite Dubai’s ongoing economic slowdown, their healthcare sector is rapidly growing and attracting major international companies to enter the market. Dubai aims to be one of the global destinations for both international and domestic medical tourist around the world. Their competitive advantage could be driven from medical tourists, as well as a high-quality country standards and cost-effective treatments and procedures. This gives Dubai a new edge in their healthcare industry by initiating medical tourism into their country.
There will be no opportunities without high demand in itself. Since the population of Dubai and other emirates is growing and aging, it conquers the high demand for the healthcare industry. Another goal that the country wants to achieve is to attract credible and world-famous health care providers across the world. Overall, Dubai’s main objective is to “create competition among healthcare providers and raised its healthcare standards”. The supporting organizations include government institutions such as the Ministry of Health, Health Authority of Abu Dhabi, Dubai Health Authority and the Dubai Healthcare City, among many others.
Secondly, the growing demands will make its own market in the UAE, especially with the healthcare industry has been showing positive changes over the past years from medical spas. Experts from Euromonitor International estimated that the UAE spa market was USD 411 million in 2015. Another evidence also came from The Global Wellness Institute which indicated that the Middle East and North African region is currently rank second in terms of the world’s most rapidly growing spa market. Furthermore, revenues gained by the UAE spa market are predicted as high as USD$495 million by the year 2019. These huge fascinating numbers give the UAE region a promising outlook in their healthcare industry.
Below are the current healthcare industry trends in the UAE which are heavily influenced by market conditions:
- High per capita spending in healthcare and wellness,
- An increase of 30 - 40% in the cost of healthcare and surgery treatment over the last 3 years from ,
- Rise in medical costs in major industry companies due to overconsumption of medical services, increasing costs of medical equipment and competition for qualified professionals, as well as increasing number of people with chronic diseases.
To address the above trends, the government now aims to complete the nation’s framework of Public-Private Partnership, as 70% of the government’s expenditure mostly occurs in the healthcare services.
These opportunities are presenting themselves across various business sectors. Although Dubai already possesses a highly specialized care and excellent clinical services, building long-term medical facilities are deemed necessary for the healthcare industry to continue to develop. Although it would come with considerably high costs, but paving the way for new investments is widely recognized as crucial to promoting the healthcare market more. With the current market condition, no doubt there is still a lot of room for investors to expand their business and operations into the region’s healthcare sector.
