Tag Archives: gulf news

April 5, 2024 · 12:22 pm

Interview with… Ghada Sawalmah

Image credit: Gulf News

The private sector is set to play a crucial role in the growth of Dubai’s dynamic and rapidly developing healthcare industry, says Ghada Sawalmah, CEO of Gargash Hospital.

“Since private hospitals are the primary investors, it is likely that the healthcare sector will experience growth driven by private hospitals in the future,” she explains. “We anticipate an increase in the number of private hospitals entering the market to take a share of the pie.”

According to current projections by the Dubai Healthcare City Authority, the UAE’s expenditure on healthcare is set to rise to Dh126 billion by 2027, with spending by the private sector growing at a projected CAGR of 8.8 per cent, compared to a CAGR of 7.5 per cent for the public sector.

Gargash Hospital is part of this burgeoning ecosystem of private hospitals, becoming the first female-owned and -led hospital in the country when it opened the doors just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Sawalmah’s understanding of the healthcare business stretches much further back – to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of two doctors, and watching her mother, Dr Husnia Gargash’s trailblazing journey as the country’s foremost fertility expert.

“I would often go to the clinics and hospitals where they worked since I was very young. I used to carefully watch my parents and their coworkers and how their actions affected the patients,” she recalls. “Being raised in a household of entrepreneurs allowed me to cultivate and enhance my business skills as well. I came to understand that my interest lay more in overseeing the business side of healthcare rather than practising as a doctor.”

The pandemic effect

That deep-seated knowledge helped Sawalmah steer the hospital through the difficult Covid years. “As a new hospital, we had to make numerous changes to our patient flow, employee management, and facility management,” she explains. “The pandemic proved to us that survival was a team sport, not only within the hospital but also within the healthcare community in Dubai. Sharing of knowledge, equipment, human resources, and PPEs was the need of the hour, and everyone stepped up to the task.”

The remarkable response to the pandemic by the UAE is one of the key reasons for the projected growth in the private healthcare sector in the upcoming years, believes Sawalmah. “After the pandemic, there has been a rise in the number of people visiting the UAE, whether for tourism or employment purposes. A significant factor for this increase is the swift and effective management of the pandemic by the UAE government.”

According to government estimates, the population of Dubai is predicted to reach 5.8 million by 2040, and when it comes to medical tourism, the UAE and Dubai, in particular, tops the list as the number one destination in the region. In 2022, the emirate received a record 674,000 medical tourists from Asia, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, who spent Dh992 million, an increase of Dh262 million from 2021.

“This indicates that a larger number of healthcare facilities will be needed to cater to the healthcare needs of the increasing population and medical visitors,” says Sawalmah. “There will be a rise in the use of new technologies and the creation of Centres of Excellence (CoE) to draw in medical tourists. The current players will either enhance their range of services or establish strategic collaborations to grow their patient base.”

Developing such strategic collaborations is the focus of Gargash Hospital’s own evolution in the near future, including major partnerships with the likes of Tarabichi Stammberger Day Surgical Center, Swift Day Surgical Center and BritishCare. “We aim to establish ourselves as strategic allies and collaborate with other healthcare professionals to offer top-notch healthcare services to our patients,” she says.

Digital healthcare

At the heart of all this development is, of course, technology. Driven by the learnings from the COVID-19 crisis, the UAE’s digital healthcare market is projected to grow from $1.06 billion (Dh3.67 billion) in 2022 to $4.42 billion by 2030, a CAGR of a whopping 19.6 per cent, according to recent industry estimates.

However, this rapid growth and assimilation of new technologies comes with a unique set of challenges for private healthcare providers, who need to juggle the costs of the technology with shifting government regulations.

“The most recent technologies demand significant financial investments for acquisition as well as implementation,” she says. “Another obstacle is combining the latest technology with the current healthcare information system (HIS), which may involve upgrading or modifying the existing HIS, resulting in additional expenses. The regulatory requirements for digital healthcare and new technologies are always changing.”

This article originally appeared in the Gulf News. You can find it here

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September 22, 2023 · 10:24 pm

Interview with… Dr. Khaled Awad

CMC Hospital treats tachycardia in a dextro-transposed heart with multiple ablations

It was a case no one else was ready to take on – a heart condition so rare that even the Mayo Clinic has recorded just 30 cases in the past 20 years – and a patient with a history of going into cardiac arrest during surgical procedures. But for Dr Khaled Awad, Electrophysiologist and Interventional Cardiologist at Clemenceau Medical Center Hospital (CMC Hospital), it was a chance to give a woman her life back.

“Everybody was telling her, ‘we can’t do it’, but she was really suffering,” says Dr. Awad. “For years, even with high dosages of anti-arrhythmia drugs, she would have a heart rate going up to 180 for many hours, every couple of days.” For people with her condition, this was potentially life-threatening, he says, because it could trigger sudden cardiac death.

Born with dextro-transposition – a rare congenital heart defect where the position of the pulmonary artery and aorta are swapped – and the survivor of open-heart surgery as an infant, this 36-year-old woman from Saudi Arabia is a medical rarity for the simple reason that most born with this condition don’t live long, passing away due to heart failure. It took the doctors at CMC Hospital three weeks of preparation, reading the sparse medical literature and doing imaging scans before taking on this “once-in-a-lifetime case”, doing a tricky three-hour procedure involving multiple ablations – introducing a catheter into her blood vessel, and using heat or cold energy to create burns on the heart to stop the electrical signals causing the tachycardia.

“One week later, she is off medications, doing well and happy to live,” says Dr Awad. “She will be able to watch her daughter go off to university, where she plans to study to become a doctor, perhaps even a cardiologist!”

This and other cutting-edge procedures are the mainstay of the Electrophysiology and Pacemaker Clinic in Dubai at CMC Hospital – one of the few such specialised clinics in the city for the treatment of all disorders of heart rhythms. These include the implantation of sophisticated Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) devices to prevent heart failure, and the latest therapies such as Conduction System Pacing (CSP), a revolutionary treatment where the pacemaker closely mimics the natural physiological pacing of the heart, considerably reducing adverse outcomes – done two months ago at CMC.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time it has been done at a private hospital in the entire MENA region,” says Dr Awad, one of only eight specialised electrophysiologists in the UAE.

Growing word of mouth means that the clinic has patients coming to them from different countries such as Pakistan and Lebanon for treatment. The reason is that electrophysiology – the study of the electrical impulses governing heart rhythms – as a specialised discipline is relatively new. Often, it is interventional cardiologists who deal with these devices and procedures, and they might lack the expertise to do so.

“There are a lot of young people who have a pacemaker put in, even when the indication was not correct. It hurts me when I see them,” Dr Awad says, adding that it could mean multiple procedures to maintain or replace the device during their lifetime. “An electrophysiologist has special training and perspective, and we might not see the indication for a pacemaker or an intervention at all.”

Access to specialists of this sort is especially crucial because these procedures are so very sophisticated and delicate. “Everything in electrophysiology is about millimetres; if you’re millimetres away during an ablation, you could damage or perforate the heart,” he says.

This is clearly a specialty that is set to grow in this region in the near future, and the Electrophysiology and Pacemaker Clinic at CMC Hospital is right at the forefront of this change.

This article originally appeared in the Gulf News. You can find it here.

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July 17, 2023 · 3:38 pm

Interview with… Circa Biotech

Company forays into uncharted territory to build a circular food waste management solution

Image credit:  Stefan Lindeque | Special to Reach by Gulf News

When you are building a pioneering biotechnology company, you have to build the very path to walk on. That is what three UAE-based entrepreneurs discovered when they began Circa Biotech, an innovative start-up that upcycles food waste into high-quality animal feed using industrial insect farming – the first of its kind in the region.

In order for Dr Haythem Riahi, CEO of Circa Biotech, and his co-founders, Kristine Wong and Liudmila Prozorova, to see their vision of sustainability come to life, they had to relentlessly draw courage and inspiration from their belief in the project. There was no legislative precedent for the sort of industrial insect farming they had in mind – feeding the indigenous Black Soldier Fly larvae with organic food waste redirected from landfills, harvesting the larvae after a short 14-day period to generate high-quality protein feed for fish and poultry, and then creating organic fertiliser from their by-products.

For them to even begin operations at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, a new category of operating licence had to be created, and they needed to convince several governmental bodies – the Ministry of Environment, Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority – that their insect farming was not harmful for the environment or people.

That was just the beginning – they still needed companies to invest in what was then perceived as a crazy idea. “We were laughed at, so many times,” recalls Riahi. But that didn’t stop them. “The three of us are PhDs with MBAs,” he says. “But the first quality we share is resilience.”

Passion for sustainability

What kept them going was their dedication to making the world a better place for future generations. For Riahi, that determination stemmed from becoming a father, and realising that a planet struggling with climate change and food shortage cannot be his children’s legacy.

“By 2050 – in just 27 years – the world will be lacking 200 million tons of protein for animal feed, and we will not be able to feed the 10 billion people on the planet,” he explains. “We all need to become passionate about sustainability, about the way we live, produce and eat.”

That passion gave the three founders the courage to take the leap of faith needed to give up their corporate jobs and transition into entrepreneurship. And slowly but surely, their work began to be noticed.

Moment of glory

The moment they knew that they were truly on the path to success was when Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, Minister of Climate Change and Environment, inaugurated their facility in 2022, signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and pledging her support. It was a reaffirmation that the company was aligned with the UAE’s food security strategy for the next 20 years.

“Our first KPI is not what we are generating in revenue; it is zero food waste,” says Riahi. “We don’t want to see any more food dumped in landfills, causing harmful methane emissions.”

Towards a better tomorrow

To that end, Circa Biotech aims to upscale its industrial capacity to produce 22,000 tons of animal feed a year by processing 200 tons of food waste a day, placing it in the top 10 companies in the world when it comes to alternative food protein.

“Today, the UAE is number four globally when it comes to food waste,” he says. “We want to go from that to making the UAE one of the top five sources of alternative protein in the coming five years.

“The solution will not come only from us. We were licence number 1 in this field of activity; now it’s open to others to come and operate in the sphere.”

For these trailblazers, that would be the greatest achievement – to see an entire ecosystem of start-ups and SMEs in the UAE follow them along the path they have built towards a sustainable future, paved with passion, belief and resilience.

This article originally appeared in Reach by Gulf News. You can find it here.

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June 15, 2023 · 3:30 pm

Interview with… The Waste Lab

Women-led start-up defies naysayers to become a sustainability trailblazer

Image supplied by Lara Hussein (left) and Ceylan Uren (right)

When Lara Hussein and Ceylan Uren gave up their jobs during the height of the pandemic to tackle the problem of food waste and climate change, many thought they were out of their minds. “Everyone said, ‘You have great stable jobs, don’t do this,’” recalls Uren, 30, an architect.

But the co-founders of The Waste Lab refused to be deterred. “We decided it was now or never. The pandemic had us asking big questions, and we couldn’t just close our eyes and go back to our corporate lives.”

They spent months talking to farmers and soil scientists in southern Turkey to create a completely nature-based composting start-up that would redirect food scraps from landfills and, as a result, reduce methane emissions and enrich the soil.

Overcoming obstacles

Despite facing multiple obstacles, such as investors who favoured technology-heavy solutions over nature-based ones, the women remained undaunted. “Everyone was looking for a technology-heavy solution, the next shiny object, and our technology was just nature,” explains 38-year-old Hussein, a communications and customer relationship specialist.

“But we realised we shouldn’t be working against nature or trying to outsmart it. We must learn from it and mimic it in a way that fits our modern age.” They persevered, found angel investors and sustainability-focused incubators, and launched their paid services in December 2021.

A growing success story

Today, the Dubai-based company has built pioneering partnerships with well-known brands such as The Hilton group, Pullman Dubai Creek City Centre, Vox Cinemas, Coffee Planet, and won a grant from Visa’s She’s Next program. Their pilot urban composting site at The Sustainable City became a community centre and permanent fixture. They have diverted 112 tons of food waste from landfills, which is equivalent to 129 tons of CO2 emissions, thanks to acquisition of farmland in 2022 allowing for larger-scale operations.

For the co-founders, this is just the beginning. They now lead a team of 12 and plan to expand their service to other emirates. They want to work with local farmers, grow their own food using compost and encourage others to join them in understanding the cycle of life and building a sustainable future.

From grit to glory, The Waste Lab’s journey is a testament to the power of determination, innovation and authentic passion. As they continue to rise every day, they inspire us all to join them on this fascinating journey of triumph.

This article originally appeared in Reach by Gulf News. You can find it here.

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