Cleveland Clinic to offer first-rate care in Abu Dhabi

Residents in the U.A.E. will soon receive the same level of care and treatment the Cleveland Clinic provides to more than five million patients in the United States, when it opens first stand-alone Cleveland Clinic campus outside the US and Canada, in Abu Dhabi next year.
The main campus in the United States, founded in 1921, is ranked fourth in the country and its heart programme is considered to be number one, being at the forefront of advances in medicine and making headlines in 2008 when doctors performed the world's first near-total face transplant.
Abdulla Abdul Aziz Al Shamsi, Executive Administrative Officer of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (CCAD), is adamant that U.A.E. residents will soon receive the same level of care when the local branch opens next year.
"The idea was to bring the quality of care that we know is already available elsewhere around the world and have it be a part of this community within the U.A.E.," he said. "More specifically, to plug a gap within the healthcare market and complement the system that is already in place," Abdulla Abdul Aziz Al Shamsi told U.A.E daily The National .
"To bring the culture of a successful and most prominent healthcare facility in the United States and be able to recreate that culture elsewhere is our basis," he added.
Foreign healthcare organisations are not new to the U.A.E.. Many of the largest public and private institutions are operated by or partnered with international groups.
Abu Dhabi's Tawam Hospital and Al Rahba Hospital are run "in affiliation" with John Hopkins Medicine, another of the leading groups in the US. Sheikh Khalifa Medical City has been managed by the Cleveland Clinic since 2007.
Eighty per cent of its physician leaders, including heads of departments, are coming from the Cleveland Clinic in the US and a third of doctors are either current or former Cleveland Clinic employees.
Designed and developed by the Mubadala Development Company, the 364-bed facility wants to take health care in Abu Dhabi to another level.
"The idea is that there is a lot of money that is spent by the Government on providing care for U.A.E. nationals, specifically providing care for them abroad," said Al Shamsi, adding, "The opportunity ... is to reinstate that care back as an option here in Abu Dhabi, and this relationship is allowing us to be able to deliver that health care, but also create something that has never been done anywhere around the world." CCAD, when it opens, will have five centres of excellence in heart and vascular, neurological, digestive diseases, eye care, and respiratory and critical care institutes.
Other institutes will include surgical subspecialities, emergency medicine, anaesthesiology and pathology and laboratory medicine.
Dr Tomislav Mihaljevic, Chief of Staff and head of the Heart and Vascular Institute at CCAD, said the opportunity for patients to receive adequate follow-up care should sway them towards seeking treatment at home rather than abroad.
There are already 2,000 staff living in Abu Dhabi ahead of the hospital's opening next year. A further 1,000 are expected to arrive by April. Almost 60 percent of them are bilingual or trilingual.
Like any successful corporate business, Cleveland Clinic invests a lot in its staff, who it refers to as caregivers. There will be weekly complimentary yoga sessions and smoking-cessation programmes available to everyone.
The caregivers, from the front-of-house 'redcoats', who wear distinctive red coats, to the heads of departments and the 20-plus medical translators, will also undergo a form of cultural awareness introduction before the facility opens.
"We are also very much in a serving leader mentality," Al Shamsi said. "That is very much a direct relationship to what you would find culturally and religiously here in the U.A.E.. But at the same time, from a physical standpoint, we are making sure that in having 50-plus nationalities that the culturalisation of these individuals as they come in and become part of the organisation is directly linked to experiences that we can provide. Leadership by example.
"When it comes to how we've interfaced with the cultural values of the U.A.E., we very much built it into the thousands of hours of collaboration ... in forming this partnership and developing the floor plans that now make up the facility." .