People are living longer and want to be healthier, all of which is good news for companies in the healthcare sector. Basheera Khan takes a look at some of the businesses hoping to cash in on the wellbeing boom.
It's official x97 people in the UK can expect to live longer than ever before. Men aged 65 can expect to live a further 17 years and women almost 20 years more if mortality rates remain constant.
Life expectancy at birth is also at its highest level. Boys and girls born in the UK could expect on average to live to 77 years and over 81 years of age respectively. These trends are mirrored in most other developed countries around the globe.
An older population means big business for those involved in health and well-being throughout all the stages of life, as the focus shifts from curing to preventing diseases. Healthcare companies are ploughing billions into developing supplements to aid functioning of brain, bone and cartilage tissue as well as the good old heart and lungs.
Across the healthcare spectrum, from cosmeceuticals to care homes and from internal medicine to the treatment of chronic and terminal illnesses, healthcare companies find the market receptive to innovative new approaches and solutions to age-old problems.
The Welsh healthcare industry is in the thick of it, with a bioscience sector which contributes about £31.3bn to the economy, and employs about 20,000 people - mostly highly qualified. And perhaps surprisingly for the country that gave birth to Aneurin Bevan, Wales has a handful of private healthcare companies which are ahead of their counterparts elsewhere in the UK.
One pioneer is Nucleus Healthcare, the UK's first private gastroenterology clinic which opened in Newport in January. The clinic augments its treatment offerings with a training programme for general practitioners and nurses, and positions itself as complementary to the existing public healthcare infrastructure.
The brainchild of consultant gastroenterologist Dr Manny Srivastava, Nucleus is a £310m venture backed largely by a number of business angels. It was born out of Dr Srivastava's frustration with the long waiting lists for gastroenterology patients in public hospitals, such as the Royal Gwent Hospital, where he'd previously worked for 13 years.
"In my speciality, you're dealing with patients with cancer of the stomach, gullet or bowel. So any wait is not acceptable to them; all they want to know is [whether they have] cancer," Dr Srivastava explains. At present, NHS patients face an average wait of just under six months to see a consultant, and another five months for a procedure. Nucleus Healthcare aims for a turnaround of four weeks between the patient's first consultation and the start of a treatment plan or referral for surgery where it's required.
It has taken Dr Srivastava five years to get Nucleus Healthcare up and running, but it is only the first part of his long-term goal. He explains: "The vision is to create a healthcare group in gastroenterology, and to roll out the concept so that the centre in Wales would be the headquarters of the units around the country, and we hope to roll out two units a year over the next five years. We have the blueprint now. The hardest thing was to get the first unit up and running, to get the backers, to get the finance, and to actually make it work. And ironically now that we've got it, people are actually knocking on the door to give us finance to roll it out."
The model could pave the way for other centres of excellence focusing on different aspects of healthcare, Dr Srivastava believes. "I think there is a niche there to set up other centres; diabetes, cardiology, dermatology, whatever. I think there are niches there for standalone units. With advances in medicine happening all the time, patients' expectations increasing, the ageing population, I think it's very difficult for the NHS to survive in its present form, and I think there has got to be some fundamental change to how patient care is delivered."
One of the significant opportunities for commercial innovation lies with the planning and funding into care for an ageing population. In particular, the financing of hospitals, clinics and care homes will change to suit the evolution of traditional relationships between patient, consultant, hospital and insurer.
A recently announced funding deal from the Royal Bank of Scotland is one of the first examples of this. Vale Healthcare is a joint venture between local medical consultants and Nuffield Hospitals which plans to set up a private clinic in South Wales.
It received a £313m funding package, arranged by HW Corporate Finance, which gives the green light to a project totalling £322m. Consultants who will work in the new facilities will own two-thirds of the business.
Howard Crackle, head of healthcare at RBS in Wales, says: "The opportunity was created from a combination of factors. There had been no new hospitals in Cardiff for over 20 years during a period of outstanding growth and change in the capital. The population has grown and this, coupled with increased levels of personal disposable income, has led to a higher demand for private medical insurance and the services of private clinicians.
"Nuffield Healthcare wanted to enter the Welsh market for some time and welcomed the opportunity to team up with a group of medical specialists already operating in South East Wales. As specialist healthcare sector bankers we were able to quickly appreciate the specific needs of this team and the banking needs they would want to access."
Crackle says the deal is part of a wider series of changes: "The recent trend towards higher fees is creating anecdotal signs of new investment. New care facilities are being opened in locations such as Cardiff and Wrexham with this creating an improved quality of environment available to the public. There is certainly a level of optimism in the sector not seen for some years, with some willing to convert this into significant investment in new homes or extensions to their existing properties."
And there seems to be a sense of economic optimism around Welsh healthcare companies. Tim Coombs, chief executive of ZooBiotic, a biosurgigal company based in Bridgend, says: "One can pick up the enthusiasm and the commitment of Welsh healthcare companies from participating in organisations like MediWales (the Welsh medical technology forum). There you get an opportunity to sit along side the senior managers of other companies started in Wales, where there is a significant prospect for growth or development internationally."
He adds: "I think it's fair to say that Wales has probably got more than its fair share, based on its per capita population, of emerging businesses which have technological promise."
Coombs suggests making funding along the lines of that provided by Finance Wales, the Assembly-backed investment agency, more widely available.
He adds that what we need to do to ensure that Wales can capitalise on that lead is to make sure that sources of funding for their development and growth are available in the way in which Finance Wales, as one organisation, has provided access to European funds. "We need to try to encourage the NHS to be ever more entrepreneurial in terms of the very significant level of expertise and development and research that it's got at its fingertips."
ZooBiotic is as good an example as any. The company was one of the first commercial businesses to be spun out from the NHS.
It supplies wound care products based on sterilised larvae which are used in rapid treatment of infected and health-threatening wounds. Tim Coombs, ZooBiotic's chief executive, says: "What we're doing is returning to a longer term historic treatment, which was used up to the First World War in significant quantities, but then was dropped because the antibiotics came along."
ZooBiotic has some formidable statistics at the foundation of its USPs. A typical chronic wound costs £32,225 to treat in the UK today, a feat which takes an average of 89 days to achieve with conventional dressings. ZooBiotic products cost £3200 to debride the same wounds, and will achieve the desired result in less than five days, on average. The company says its products can save the UK over £3165m per year and the EU in excess of £31000m. ZooBiotic larvae are in demand across the company's current distribution reach, roughly the extent of the EU, somewhat ironically due to the steady decline in efficacy of conventional antibiotics.
Coombs comments: "In the last 60 years, the approach (to wound treatment) has been to use antibiotics. Unfortunately because of their overuse and misuse, they've now become far less effective, and as a result of that we've seen this wave of hospital superbugs. So one principal driver for the resurrection of the use of larvae in chronic, infected or long-lasting wounds has been the fact that the conventional tools have lost their power and there seems to be far less research and development done by pharmaceutical companies today to replace them with new antibiotics."
ZooBiotic now produces 600,000 maggots, and 1500 LarvE BioFOAM dressings per month from its pharmaceutical production unit - supplying a client base of more than 4,000.
It recently achieved ISO certification, the first step in a strategy for global expansion which will see the company licensing its brand and expertise to target markets in the US and Asia.