Healthcare Vital Signs

We see a real opportunity to embrace this area within Commercial Real Estate and expect to see future developments and communities contain more focus on Wellness and Health-related offerings. This is an exciting time to be involved in Healthcare Real Estate. The area of health and wellness is becoming more and more prominent as a trend and topic of conversation in our lives. With greater emphasis placed on this, there is movement to harness earlier stage adoption resulting in a greater level of inclusion within the design of our future cities and spaces, ultimately benefiting our communities as not only a core, but a required amenity that strengthens them. Add into the mix the ever- increasing use of technology and the rapidly expanding MedTech sector we are on course for a very different healthcare landscape than we are presently used to. This is shifting how we perceive and use healthcare more than we have ever known; with the desired transition from a predominantly reactive service to a proactive service that should ultimately benefit the consultants through improving efficient use of their time and us – the users, by earlier diagnosis. Think more regular check-ups, akin to your yearly car service for instance; and ultimately live health monitoring – the orange light coming on your dashboard when you need to arrange for a service. Whilst there is a move towards proactive treatment, the overall experience is also being reconsidered and redefined, to embrace what the population wants – a more bespoke and experiential service. Don’t think experience is just ‘good service’, but more of creating a strong relationship of trust, a real desire to keep coming back to learn, to improve and look forward to your catch-ups with your consultants. The: Future: Laboratory states that ‘as health and wellness are finally entrenched as a mainstream mindset, they will become embedded into cities, with more wellness communities and real estate projects on the horizon.’ We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please get in touch at FERGUS.FORSYTH@CUSHWAKE.COM A joint venture development of the Eastern Waterfront of Toronto by Waterfront Toronto and Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is creating a new people-centred neighbourhood, ‘combining forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology’, aiming to achieve ‘precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity’. Considering Alphabet’s ventures into urban healthcare, with their CityBlock Health project, the Eastern Waterfront of Toronto presents one opportunity to start to define the next steps of how healthcare and wellness should be physically integrated into our communities. Importantly this should not be a retrofit courtesy of an afterthought, it should be on the drawing board from the very beginning. As earlier stated, the Global Real Estate value of ‘Wellness’ reached £90bn in 2017, with it expected to surpass £116bn by 2020 according to the Global Wellness Summit THE GROWTH OF WELLNESS & HEALTHCARE OFFERINGS 27 | CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD