MARKET REPORT SUMMARY HEALTHCARE TRANSFORMATION 2022 will be a transformative year for global health. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought longexisting weaknesses in our healthcare systems into sharp relief as they buckled under the pressure of the health crisis. This calls for a shift towards new models of care that involve acting earlier to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases, and harnessing transformative innovations to improve patient outcomes. This in turn will help us address the unsustainable burden of disease and ensure the resilience of our health systems against future shocks. Key factors. People worldwide are living longer. By 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years or over. The number of persons aged 80 years or older is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050 to reach 426 million. While this shift in distribution of a country’s population towards older ages started in high-income countries (for example in Japan 30% of the population is already over 60 years old), it is now low- and middleincome countries that are experiencing the greatest change. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population over 60 years will live in low- and middle-income countries. Physical challenges of old age and unhealthy lifestyles in working aged people have led to an increasing prevalence of non-communicable disease (“NCD”) and chronic conditions. Where the NCDs itself account for 71% of global death. Since older people are more likely to require healthcare and since the types of care they require are more likely to be resourceintensive, this is creating a surge of demand. This has led for global spending on health continually rising between 2000 and 2018 and reached US$ 8.3 trillion or 10 per-cent of global Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”). The healthcare industry is fast-moving, constantly evolving and highly competitive. This has been clearly demonstrated in the COVID-19 crisis, where multiple pharmaceutical companies raced to become the first to synthesise, approve and distribute a vaccine globally. This was ultimately achieved less than one year after the pandemic was declared. There is a greater choice in treatments than at any time in history. Every year, huge scientific breakthroughs open new markets in various sectors. In 2020 alone, the Federal Drugs Administration in the USA approved 53 novel treatments. Where once it was the case that healthcare providers only competed within territories, now the competition is global. Buoyed by the low costs of international journeys, “medical tourism” is becoming an increasingly common trend. Medical tourism is where an individual will relocate to a different territory to take advantage of their higher-quality and/or lower-priced healthcare sector. Where individuals do decide to relocate to treatment, they can take advantage of drugs or treatments not available in their own country or access the same level of treatment for a lower net cost. FOCUS IS SHIFTING FROM HEALTH CARE TO HEALTH & WELL-BEING. MORE RESOURCES ARE BEING ALLOCATED FROM THE END OF THE HEALTH CARE VALUE CHAIN TO THE BEGINNING. AL-`AQAR HEALTHCARE REIT ANNUAL REPORT 2021 058
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