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The shifting sands of the United Arab Emirates' strategic initiatives can be difficult to keep up with. MT pinned down Carl V. Stanifer, CEO of the recently formed Abu Dhabi Company for Health Services (SEHA), to get an status report on the emirate's latest health venture.

What is SEHA?

The mandate of SEHA was set out in an Emirati decree of April of 2007 - the primary objective was to create an entity or organisation which would assume ownership and management responsibility of the formally public hospitals that were under Health Authority Abu Dhabi (HA-AD).

We've created a corporate office, we've put together a senior corporate management scheme and we've assimilated all these assets and all these people and all these businesses into this new identity.

The objective in doing so is to separate the provision of healthcare from the regulation of healthcare because it doesn't seem proper that the regulators should be regulating themselves as operators.

But is it a public or private company - how will it balance its books?

We're a privately owned company, owned by the government - so that it gives us more flexibility with policy setting, organisation structure, management style.

The annual budget is reviewed by a board of director and senior management and we review it with all the hospital CEOs who are responsible for building these budgets.

When we are happy with it we go to the Department of Finance (DoF) and ask for our budget to be funded and that is done in a block-budget sort of way - so we are funded every quarter and then at the end of the year we report back and say here is what we want next year.

But the objective is to move eventually to the point where the provision of services is 100% covered by insurance. We would only come to the DoF to fund things like research, education or trauma centres - things that can't be covered in an insurance-only set up.

Has SEHA been given a blank cheque by the government in the short term?

Our heavy investing will be in the next three to five years. New hospitals, new clinics and new infrastructure and so forth.

We're not going to go back to the DoF for every penny of that - we're looking at traditional mortgage financing and we're looking at joint ventures with what you might call the ‘true' private sector.

We're trying to bring in as much private money as we can, whether it is through loans or joint ventures, to finance that infrastructure. The cost of that infrastructure becomes the cost of our doing business each year.

SEHA's aim is to provide "world-class healthcare" in Abu Dhabi. Is it really possible to achieve those standards in a relatively immature market?

There are three distinct legs to creating world-class healthcare. The first of those are the clinical services, and in some respects that may be the easiest: the second and third are the research and education.

You have to have all three if you ever want to achieve world-class. In the case of education and research, however, they are almost generational.

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