THE WORLD’S HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS HAVE REACHED A PIVOTAL JUNCTURE
With the population expanding and ageing and chronic conditions becoming ever more common, the demand for healthcare is rising exponentially. According to the World Health Organisation, global healthcare spending more than doubled in the past two decades and reached 9.8% of global Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) in 2019.
At the same time, a shortage of healthcare workers is hampering our capacity to keep up with demand. It is estimated that by 2031, the Netherlands alone will face a shortage of almost 160,000 healthcare workers. This trend is visible around the world. As a result of all this, it seems inevitable that care demand will eventually outstrip supply, creating an increasingly widening care gap.
Greater healthcare expenditure also goes hand in hand with a more significant environmental footprint. At this moment, the healthcare sector is already a (much) larger polluter than the aviation industry. If it were a country, the healthcare sector would be the fifth largest emitter on the planet (Health Care Without Harm report, September 2010). Therefore, medical innovations in supply and demand are essential to bridge the healthcare gap, keep healthcare accessible to all and limit its environmental footprint.
NLC was founded in 2015 with the mission of advancing health and bringing science to life by building health-technology ventures out of innovative ideas and inventions originating from universities, academic hospitals and corporates across Europe. These innovations can improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment and self-care, enhance workforce vitality or procedural efficiency, reduce the environmental footprint of the healthcare sector and more.
NLC’s Impact & ESG Policy outlines the theoretical framework we use to measure how NLC and its Portfolio Companies can make a positive impact while generating healthy financial returns, how we identify potential ESG risks and opportunities, how NLC’s impact-investment thesis is incorporated into our due-diligence and portfolio-management processes, and how we report all this to our investors.
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