NHS Challenges

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Challenges

To ensure continuity to build on the work of NHS-2, it is important to understand the challenges that currently remain for Qatar’s health sector. These can be categorized across three areas: Population Health, Service Delivery and Patient Experience, and Health System Efficiency and Resilience. These areas of challenge inform the set of strategic priorities for NHS-3.

Population Health

NHS-2 has made substantial progress in the safeguarding of physical, mental and social health and wellbeing across Qatar’s unique population. However, a remaining challenge is the burden of non-communicable disease (NCD), attributing to 650 deaths in every 100,000 population3. As a comparison, leading global healthcare systems are around 240 deaths per 100,000. There are high incidence rates of obesity and diabetes, with unhealthy lifestyle choices across population groups acting as a key contributor, for example, 44 percent of adults in Qatar are overweight and 22 percent are smokers. Approximately 19 percent of NCD deaths are related to complications from diabetes, which is relatively high compared to leading health systems, given Qatar’s young population.

Prevention efforts and population health initiatives can further reduce incidence rates through a continued focus on health literacy, and an integrated approach across private and public sector entities.

Service Delivery and Patient Experience

Building on the success of NHS-2 in improving accessibility to health services across all population groups, NHS-3 must continue to address the variance in quality and ease of access across secondary and tertiary care settings. Progressing the development of more integrated and standardized care pathways will further enable patients and caregivers to navigate the health system, empowering them to take ownership of their own health journeys.

In particular, there is a disproportionate focus on non-standardized curative care in hospitalized settings, versus preventable care in community and primary care settings – 69 percent of visits that could be dealt with in the primary care setting occur in specialty hospitals. Evidence-based approaches to modernizing care delivery and the design of patient pathways will address this.

There are also efforts to be made towards increasing patient trust in the quality of care. Non-standard patient journeys and high levels of repeat visits are key factors. Additionally, some residents choose to seek treatment abroad over local options.

Health System Efficiency and Resilience

NHS-2 delivered significant system resilience and sustainability improvements in the most challenging of circumstances, including COVID-19 and FIFA World Cup 2022. Continued efforts should focus on system efficiency, digitization and data availability, Research and Development (R&D), workforce upskilling, and coordinated system planning across the public and private sectors.

A key barrier to efficient system integration is limited digitization across the system, with providers now working towards meeting national e-health requirements. The majority of providers have yet to fully transform their data collection and availability, which will enable national level health analytics solutions, and inform planning and decision making across the whole of the system.

Ensuring a resilient health system requires a rebalance of sector workforce skills (including clinical and non-clinical staff) to reflect sector needs; talent acquisition and retention also remain relevant challenges. The R&D and innovation ecosystem could also be bolstered to strengthen resiliency in the health system. Further support for R&D could attract talent, while advancing healthcare innovation for positive patient outcomes.

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