With HBI 2024 now under a week away, we spoke with Ambika Jindal, Group Head of Sustainability Integration & Implementation at ING, about the bank’s sustainability journey and the importance of sustainability generally in the healthcare sector.
It is tempting to think of universal health coverage as a quantitative endeavour since, after all, the goal is to bring sustainable and accessible health care to more and more of the planet’s people. But while numbers and quantity matter, the mission is about quality at its heart.
Few relationships embody and require trust quite like the one between patients and doctors. Every minute of every day, all over the planet, people put their lives in the hands of health care professionals and the facilities they work in.
TVM Capital Healthcare, an emerging markets PE firm based out of Singapore and Dubai, has raised $250 million to invest in the ongoing transformation of Saudi Arabia’s healthcare sector. The PE firm says that, when combined with co-investments from its partner base, it expects a total of $400-500 million to be mobilised by its Afiyah Fund, making it “the largest of its kind”.
The newly-formed far-right Dutch coalition government of the PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB parties this month laid out its agreed policy programme in the document ‘Hoop, Lef en Trots’ (‘Hope, Courage and Pride’). While the agreement expresses the new government’s intention to improve healthcare accessibility and make the sector more attractive for workers, it also outlines substantial budget cuts that have raised concerns among healthcare industry groups.
The world is facing a major healthcare workforce crisis. The effects of shortages are already being felt across both developed and developing countries. By 2030, the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts a shortage of 10 million health workers globally, predominantly in low and lower-middle-income countries.
Workers in Finland’s private diagnostic imaging and labs sectors have called a strike over wages. Major groups Mehiläinen, Terveystalo, Pihlajalinna, Synlab and Vita Laboratories will be affected. However, a Terveystalo spokesperson tells us the strikes “are not expected to have a material impact on providers nor risk the health of our patients”.
Two weeks ago Germany’s cabinet government approved Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s hospital reform. The current watered-down reform’s key feature is a proposal to move the sector’s reimbursement model away from fee-per-service payments, purportedly to reduce the incentive to overtreat. However, experts tell us the real motivation is still to shut down smaller unspecialised hospitals. Will it succeed in doing so?
The UK Labour Party this week unveiled its latest election pledge — to clear the NHS backlog of patients waiting over 18 weeks for treatment within the first term of a Labour government. The party expects this to involve making greater use of the private sector.
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