48 Gastbeitrag Internationale Märkte | Exploring Scotland’s exciting healthcare marketl Exploring Scotland’s exciting healthcare market Scotland is world-renowned for its beautiful landscape, great whiskies, golf and unpredictable weather. But perhaps lesser known, is that Scotland also has a rich history of medical innovation: from the world’s first cloned sheep (better known as Dolly) to pioneering the 3D printing of stem cells. Scotland and the wider UK offer great opportunities to German companies who want to expand to new markets or find collaboration partners for business or research & development. The UK is the third largest market in Europe for medical devices and the National Health Service (NHS) Scotland, the Scottish national healthcare provider, alone spends £1.48 billion per year on procurement. Total healthcare expenditure in the UK in 2020 was £257.6 billion. So, despite the barriers of Brexit, it is a great market to explore. Scotland’s vibrant life sciences industry growth is currently 8 percent per year. There are more than 700 life sciences businesses based in Scotland, employing over 41,000 people. Turnover for the cluster in 2019 was more than £7 billion with exports contributing £3 billion, an increase of more than 80 percent since 2010. This makes Scotland one of the largest life sciences clusters in Europe. The sector’s strengths can be found in medical technologies, pharmaceutical services, digital health and care, animal health, aquaculture, agritech (AAA), and industrial biotech. From startups to global companies, world-class universities and innovation centres, the region offers everything companies need to succeed. The market is dominated by the publicly funded National Healthcare Provider, NHS Scotland, which unlike in Germany, is backed by taxes rather than salary contributions. NHS Scotland acts independently but according to similar principles as the NHS in England. One key difference is that in Scotland Health and Care are integrated. 14 regional health boards are responsible for delivering primary and acute health care services to the population. Only around 10 percent of the population are privately insured. However, the out-of-pocket expenditure has been growing in Scotland and the UK as a whole. The NHS Scotland regularly publishes innovation challenges, inviting companies to collaborate and can also provide some funding. Past challenges included Diabetes Monitoring, Combatting Drug Abuse and Understanding and providing technical support for the Menopause. Innovation challenges planned for the near future include a Remote Asthma Management challenge. Those innovation challenges can be found on the Public Contracts Scotland website (https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/) and are usually open for international companies as well. » Life Sciences Scotland, Quelle: © Scottish Enterprise Current tenders are also published on the Public Contracts Scotland Website and Innovators, who want to work with the NHS Scotland should check out the Scotland Innovates portal (https://innovator.scot), a safe route to connect with Scotland’s public sector. When it comes to Digital Health, Scotland is at the forefront. Electronic health care records, picture archiving and a personal patient identification number against which each health care interaction is recorded have been in existence since the 1960s, providing Scotland with some of the best anonymised health data in the world that can be combined with social and genetic data and be used for research
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