Health strategies, policies and laws

The UAE’s laws ensure the best and the most professional healthcare services while guaranteeing rights to patients. Policies in various sectors such as medical care, medication, medical facilities and others have been developed to complement the law and offer a holistic approach to healthcare services in the UAE.

Healthcare strategies

The UAE Government is working in collaboration with all health authorities in the country to have all public and private hospitals accredited according to clear national and international quality standards of medical services and staff.

Furthermore, the National Agenda emphasises the importance of preventive medicine and seeks to reduce cancer and lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases to ensure a longer, healthy life for citizens. In addition, the Agenda aims to reduce the prevalence of smoking and increase the healthcare system’s readiness to deal with epidemics and health risks. To achieve such goals, the UAE government is improving its ranking in 11 indices relating to healthcare and protection.

Health policies

Read about

Learn about health programmes in Abu Dhabi.

Health laws

The UAE Government adopted different legislations, which protect the patient rights, regulate medical facilities, medicines and medical staff work. Find related legislations on the websites of:

Ministry of Health and Prevention
Department of Health- Abu Dhabi ( Read under Resources)
Dubai Health Authority
Insurance in Dubai.

Read about patients’ rights and responsibilities.

The National Nutrition Guidelines

Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHaP) launched the National Nutrition Guidelines (1.95 MB, PDF in Arabic) to serve as a unified national reference on food and nutrition education in the UAE’s community and health institutions. The guideline aims to:

improve the nutritional status of the UAE’s community and raise awareness about healthy eating behaviour and lifestyle-related diseases
reduce the prevalence of chronic and malnutrition diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, anemia, osteoporosis and vitamin deficiency
scale down non-communicable diseases and mortality rates
encourage individuals to engage in physical activities for better health.

The guidelines consist of six guides. They are:

to support and promote a healthy living system through healthy food and physical activity
to maintain healthy food intake at all stages of life
to reduce calories resulting from high sugar, saturated and trans fats and to reduce salt intake
to eat variety of diet food and drinks that are rich in nutrients and high in nutritional intensity
to adopt healthy food patterns
to achieve food safety.

The National Nutrition Guidelines were developed in collaboration with the UAE’s Food and Water Security Office, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Gulf Nutrition Committee and the local government bodies across the UAE.

Related links

Updated on 13 Jun 2022

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