Health

L’accès aux soins de santé au Maroc progresse rapidement à tous les niveaux du spectre socio-économique, et ce, en partie grâce à la mise en œuvre d’un nouveau programme gouvernemental qui vise à étendre la gratuité des soins aux habitants à faible revenu, ainsi qu’à une augmentation des investissements privés dans les établissements sanitaires électifs afin de promouvoir le tourisme médical.

On April 3, 2011, Qatar officially launched the National Health Strategy (NHS) 2011-16, the government’s plan to upgrade and improve the country’s health care sector. Based on principles originally outlined in National Vision 2030, Qatar’s long-term development programme, the NHS has the potential to bring about substantial changes to the sector.

Indonesia’s government is pushing forward with ambitious plans to reform the country’s health network, aiming to have a system of universal social health insurance coverage in place by 2014, though the project faces a number of challenges, not least of which are its sheer scale and cost.

With the South-east Asian medical tourism market rapidly expanding, Malaysia is working to capture a larger share, with industry's designation as a national key economic area (NKEA) central to this effort. The government hopes these measures will help boost health tourist arrivals from the 2010 total of 400,000, which generated revenues of $101.65m.

The health care industry has moved front and centre of the development agenda throughout the Gulf and wider Middle Eastern region. The industry’s resilience to the effects of the global economic crisis over the past two years has whetted the appetite of private investors, while governments are concerned about growing demographic pressure on social services.

Saudi Arabia’s insurance sector is set for changes in 2011 with the implementation of a law mandating health insurance for all private sector employees. While just one aspect of the rapid pace of change in the sector, the expansion is likely to create a deeper and wider presence for insurers in the Kingdom.