The GCC’s private hospital sector had a highly volatile second half of the 2010s despite being the target of huge foreign investments in the first. Public data shows huge fluctuations in annual growth in 2014-2019 across Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Dubai, UAE.

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The chart above shows year-on-year growth in inpatient and outpatient volumes and workforce for all private hospitals in the four markets. Thanks to private sector-besotted governments the long-term trend is an upwards one, but a combination of economic slowdowns, political crises, payor pressure and possibly the early stages of an exodus of foreign nationals have made it a bumpy road.

In 2017, there were massive drops in inpatient activity in Bahrain and physicians and nurses employed in Qatar, the latter most likely due to the political spat with its neighbours. Bahrain’s growth had been on a downward trend since 2014 but seems to have stabilised in 2018 and 2019.

Inpatient and outpatient volume growth in Dubai slowed significantly in 2016 before recovering in 2017. In 2018, its outpatient activity fell 3% but inpatients soared by a whopping 30%. They then fell 10% in 2019 but we’ve not included it in the graph because five hospitals in the Dubai Healthcare City were taken out of the data. The drop might not solely be down to that: there was plenty of anecdotal evidence of a crisis in the hospital market that year partially related to the departure of high-earning foreigners.

Kuwait’s discharges were down 3% in 2015, up 3-5% in 2016-2017 then flat in 2018-2019. A reform in 2016-2017 has boosted the private sector significantly and may have helped it buck the trend.