Mubasher: Private investors have to inject further investment into the long-term preventive healthcare in the UAE, said prominent scientist and founder of the UAE Genetic Diseases Association, Dr Maryam Matar.
The UAE is facing increasing rates of "lifestyle" illness such as diabetes, she added.
Matar noted that investors' concentration on curative measures is essential, highlighting huge lack of investment in prevention.
“Prevention is one of those areas where investors do not get income so quickly, not because it’s high-risk but because it takes patience,” the doctor said.
Investors are looking at solutions that would take 15 years to bear results, but prevention is in a need to capital from 'true investors' who are willing to make smart long-term investments, founder of the UAE Genetic Diseases Association explained.
Demand for healthcare provision in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is on the rise owing to a rapidly expanding population, according to property consultancy JLL.
MENA is expected to need 470,000 additional hospital beds over the coming five years to keep pace with minimum per capita requirements set by the OECD.
This service provision gap has propelled policymakers to explore preventive, rather than curative, strategies to upgrade the overall health of populations and ease the pressure on infrastructure.
The GCC is in the “grip of a healthcare crisis” on the back of the increasingly sedentary lifestyle and a diet laden with sugar, leading to a rise in chronic diseases, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said in recent report.
“In the case of many of these non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – particularly obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer – early diagnosis and preventive health care can have a large positive impact, either preventing diseases from occurring or effectively managing them once they have developed, to produce better patient outcomes and quality of life,” EIU’s report showed.
The GCC's healthcare expenditure for diabetes is forecast to raise to $21.8 billion by 2040, from $12.8bn in 2015, according to a separate report by the EIU and EY in May.
There was a 'worrying lack of investment' in strategies to revamp overall health, Dr Maryam Matar told a healthcare symposium in Dubai.
She added that untapped opportunities include the establishment of sleep clinics, citing that “there is no single comprehensive sleep clinic in the region”.
Matar urged further investment to streamline medical education and bolster the supply of "genetic counsellors" in a bid to shore up people with inherited genetic conditions.
“We have only one licensed genetic counsellor in Dubai, can you imagine?” the doctor told the symposium.
“The whole industry is booming with laboratories providing genetic screening, but there is no ethical protocol requiring you to provide your patient with proper genetic counselling that helps them decide what to do with this information,” she said.
