The social side • Chapter summary
Both health and education are key components of the Qatar 2030 National Vision and have been subject to heavy investments in the past decade, making Qatar home to some of the most modern hospitals in the world, such as Sidra Medicine hospital as well as a whole array of local and international universities.
Despite the challenges faced, Qatar’s healthcare sector has proved its readiness after Qatar’s solid results in managing the COVID-19 pandemic and the rolling-out of an effective country-wide vaccination campaign. “The entire healthcare sector has played an important role in Qatar’s comprehensive measures to protect its population from COVID-19. There are three key focus areas of our strategy that have been central to the healthcare sector’s COVID-19 strategy: capacity expansion, proactive testing strategy, and protecting the most vulnerable people,” declared Dr. Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari, Minister of Public Health, in an interview with The Business Year.
Qatari nationals are guaranteed access to free healthcare through Qatar’s public healthcare system. The state has recently explored different approaches to healthcare dispensation which might impact both the private and public healthcare systems in the future. An example can be found in the recent draft law on regulating healthcare services in Qatar. Under this law, the Ministry of Public Health will set standards for the provision of healthcare services in government and private health facilities. It also provides for mandatory health insurance for visitors and expats, something that has come as a blessing for insurers operating in Qatar. Additionally, Qatar continues to work on improving an already world-class tertiary healthcare system and expanding preventive healthcare with a strong focus on cancer screening and genetic screening programs.
Regarding education, Qatar relies on a highly dynamic network of national and international universities, institutes, colleges, and research centers in pursuit of a knowledge-based economy. New cooperation initiatives bringing together academia and public and private companies are not new in Qatar, as research is being envisioned in a practical manner and with a go-tomarket mindset. At the forefront of this is Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). “Our focus for the near future as a university is take more and more of our start-up ideas into the market. We are really in the process of establishing what we call HBKU R&D Corporation, which we would like to be the arm of commercializing a great deal of our research and the products that our researchers and students are getting into as a result of their work,” said Ahmad M. Hasnah, President of HBKU.
On top of that, COVID-19 has showed that education has no physical limits thanks to technology. Taking advantage of its large ecosystem of world-class universities, Qatar-based educational institutions have the opportunity to cater to an increasing number of students located elsewhere and become a reference in online tertiary education.