Prime Highlights
- NMC Healthcare is expanding its palliative care services across the UAE to support patients with serious and life-limiting illnesses.
- The service operates at two hospitals, making NMC one of the few providers offering dedicated palliative care in the country.
Key Facts
- The programme is led by Dr Paul Coulter and supports patients from diagnosis through end-of-life care.
- The service focuses on filling gaps in UAE healthcare, especially for non-cancer patients, using a multidisciplinary care approach.
Background
NMC Healthcare is expanding its palliative care offering across the United Arab Emirates, addressing one of the most underserved areas in the country’s healthcare system as demand for end-of-life support continues to grow.
The service runs across two locations, NMC Speciality Hospital Al Nahda and NMC Royal Hospital Dubai Investments Park, making NMC one of only a handful of providers in the UAE offering dedicated palliative care to patients with serious or life-limiting conditions.
Palliative care remains a relatively new specialty in the UAE. Access is especially limited for patients who do not have cancer, a gap that NMC says its programme is specifically designed to fill. Dr Paul Coulter, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, leads the service, which covers patients from the point of diagnosis through to end of life.
The human side of the service comes through clearly in the experience of Mohd. Mazhar Siddique, a long-term UAE resident diagnosed with terminal Interstitial Lung Disease. His daughter Fouzia described the search for a palliative care doctor as a search for dignity. “I was seeking someone who was going to offer my family the dignity that we would want our father to have in death, in much the same way as he had lived his life,” she said.
Dr Coulter worked with the family across multiple specialities including neurology, cardiology, and pulmonology, arranging home visits, managing symptoms, and guiding the family through decisions about end-of-life care.
Dr Coulter said the work goes beyond clinical treatment. “Palliative care is about more than treatment. It is about dignity, compassion and being truly present for patients and families at the most difficult moments,” he said.
NMC’s palliative care team works alongside referring clinicians to address the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of patients, aiming to help them live as comfortably as possible for as long as possible.
