Carly Caton, Partner at Bevan Brittan, examines how COVID has changed the international market for NHS organisations
The global health industry was worth around $8.5 trillion in 2018 and is expected to be worth around $10 trillion by 2022. Healthcare takes more than 10 per cent of the GDP of most developed countries. So against this backdrop, what role does the NHS have to play in the global health market? And how has that changed in the past year due to the COVID-19 Pandemic?
We have been supporting our NHS clients’ international journeys for more than 10 years (from advising on some of the first international healthcare ventures the NHS entered into overseas (such as SLAM and Moorfields in the Middle East) to some of the more recent international partnerships to be entered into for the provision of specialist consultancy and education services).
It is unlikely there will ever be a huge number of NHS organisations opening up branches of their hospital all around the world, but we will see more of our expertise in training, education and specialist services being shared globally and more contracts of this nature being entered into.
Our health market has a lot to offer internationally and is at the forefront in many areas such as mental health, specialist services like cancer, cardio and maternity and primary care systems (which are not well developed in many parts of the world). The evolution of the health system as a whole and our experience of joined up working is also a selling point. While we still have a way to go ourselves in becoming truly integrated, we are well ahead of the game compared to many countries.
The COVID effect
In terms of how COVID has affected the work the NHS is doing, or wants to do internationally, there has obviously been an impact. But there have also been opportunities. The NHS showed that it was able to rapidly mobilise fully-equipped, additional critical care facilities through partnerships with private sector organisations. And at a national planning level we developed the predictive modelling tools required to understand the system impact of the virus on a given population. The outputs from this informed regional and local systems in future proofing essential capacity and facilities to plan effectively for any further surges. We have seen an increased interest in surge hospital projects and remote healthcare systems from countries around the world and this is something we are able to respond to.
In the Healthcare UK Annual Review it states that, despite COVID, the team still worked on a pipeline of 158 opportunities across the year with the focus on infrastructure projects and digital health. For the coming year, they say opportunities lie in new infrastructure projects (such as cancer centres), remote assessment, diagnostics and smart diagnostics, treatment and case management, patient-facing education and monitoring and cutting edge medical technology.
Another issue which has been difficult for the NHS in continuing its international work during the COVID pandemic relates to workforce and travel. Obviously there has been no international travel which has stopped any face to face meetings or relationship building (which is so important in certain parts of the world and which cannot always be replicated online). The rapid adoption of Teams by the NHS as a way of communicating has been really successful for some clients and enabled them to keep their international collaborations moving along. There has also been the issue of staff not being able to fly out to provide services under their international partnering arrangements – as well, of course, as the issue of not being able to rely on staff coming from outside of the UK to work for our NHS here (but that is a different matter).
Finally, the directors and managers within the NHS organisations that generate income from international contracts have been diverted in to all sorts of other jobs for periods of times during the last year. This has meant that the time they would have normally spent on securing new business and opportunities has been very limited, and it has been slower to progress discussions in relation to international partnerships. Having said that, in the last few months we have seen a definite upturn in the amount of activity we are supporting our NHS clients with, and we are hopeful this will continue.
So has COVID changed the way the NHS will work internationally? I think the answer is that COVID has changed the way everybody will do everything. There is little to nothing that remains untouched by it. It has slowed things in the interim, but has also brought opportunities. The type of work which the NHS may do internationally moving forwards could be quite different as the global healthcare market reflects on its health systems, how they work well and how they could work better.
Contact Information:
carly.caton@bevanbrittan.com