The knowledge economy and the “fourth industrial revolution” is exacerbating an already prevalent skills deficit across all our markets and impacting all sectors of the economy. Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent then in the health care space where the prospect for merging physical, digital and biomedical systems can have far reaching potential for healthcare provision.
Healthcare demand in ASEAN and other emerging markets is increasing rapidly, driven by population growth rates and growing income levels that are expected to outstrip those of other geographies, and an epidemiological shift from infectious diseases to a chronic disease pattern matching Western markets. While the public health care sector remains dominant in many of these markets and is increasingly under pressure with growth and funding issues, the ASEAN region’s private healthcare market continues to exhibit solid growth.
One of the major challenges however constraining the above growth of the healthcare sectors across ASEAN remains an acute shortage of medical personnel. The average number of physicians and nurses in ASEAN is 0.6 per 1,000 and 1.5/1,000 compared to OECD averages of 3.4 and 8.8 respectively. To compound the problem, owing to a weak medical education system, the quality of graduates remains an endemic issue in several of these countries.
Meanwhile the continuing professional training and development of healthcare professionals is hugely inadequate in several ASEAN markets. The reality is however – as we are witnessing in many health care markets around the world – the increasing pace of medical innovation and the ever-changing role of healthcare providers is making such continuous training an increasingly vital part of the medical education continuum for practitioners. Arguably in ASEAN, the need – and opportunity – for such training is even more acute given the divergent quality standards amongst medical healthcare professionals and the growing shortage of specialised skills in the face of burgeoning demand.