Property sector reaps big from rising demand for luxury healthcare

Is a pregnant woman sick? It is a question that Equity Group Holdings Chief Executive James Mwangi posed during the release of the lender’s 2025 half-year financials.

His thoughts are that a pregnant woman doesn’t need to be in a hospital environment to deliver. As an entrepreneur, he added, he seeks to make this a reality through the group’s subsidiaries that house businesses in the health space.

Equity Group Holdings owns the Equity Afya chain of health facilities through Equity Group Foundation, besides also providing insurance services through Equity Group Insurance Holdings. This ambition for luxurious maternity care services comes from data that 60 per cent of inpatient cases are mothers delivering. And Mwangi’s wild imagination is that a pregnant woman should deliver in a five-star hotel-like environment.

“Why do they go to the hospital? An entrepreneur thinks differently, I said, why don’t we do four, three, and two-star hotels where mothers can go to deliver, and you bring nurses and doctors?” he posed.

He insisted that pregnant mothers do not need to be in a hospital environment where they risk getting contaminated with actual sick patients.

“Delivering a baby is not a sickness and should be done in the best environment possible so that we can especially welcome the newborn,” he said.

Mwangi’s views mirror how, in recent times, the face of healthcare in the country has been morphing.

Hospitals, particularly private facilities, with a few public ones, have been going the extra mile to embed patient experience in their services.

One area where this is being done is through re-imagining patient stay through the lens of hospitality.

An easier entry point in the Kenyan market seems to be maternity services. In such instances, patient rooms are no longer being referred to as wards per se but suites.

In July last year, The Nairobi Hospital unveiled a modern unit for pregnant women aimed at providing a comfortable environment for its clientele. The intention, the facility said, is to provide mothers and their newborns with the most suitable environment during their stay. “The focus on patient experience is relatively a new phenomenon in healthcare,” said Dr Barcely Onyambu, Kenya Hospital Association (KHA) Chairperson. “We know now that the experience of the mother during labour, delivery, and recovery not only impacts that mother but also the baby for the rest of their lives.”

He said the need for good delivery suites, enhanced recovery areas, and maternal monitoring systems has been informed by the facility’s continuous need for innovative growth. “We are a 71-year-old institution. Over the period, we have been consistent in these two things: quality and patient safety. This is what drove us to redesign these spaces,” he said.

But as hospitals come up with these ‘extra’ services, one question that lingers is: are there amenities that are excess when it comes to patient care?

Churchill Winston, who until December 2025 was the Chief Executive of SIC Investment Co-operative, an institution behind several real estate projects in the country, says there are some amenities that, when added to hospital care, would be considered excess. “Although luxury services like spas, fine dining, and luxury suites are likely to be attractive to VIP clients, they do not necessarily contribute to better clinical outcomes,” he says.

“Actually, excessive focus on luxury may shift most vital resources to non-essential areas such as luxury and divert them to other important services such as emergency, diagnostics, and sufficient staffing.”

Winston insists that in the case of hospitals, it must always be functionality, hygiene, and access, which directly lead to patient safety, comfort, and recovery, instead of being lavish in additional features that may hold little medical value.

In 2021, Nairobi West Hospital unveiled a modern helipad in a fanfare event that was highly publicised by celebrities.

The helipad is meant to help in medical evacuation cases. Services like private rooms and fine dining, however, are still key as they may help hospitals attract high-paying clients such as VIPs.

It brings to light how, in the recent past, some facilities in the country have been using celebrities to endorse their services, which portrayed their businesses as some sort of staycation destinations.

This has been witnessed more so for maternity cases. Winston says when targeting VIP clients, communication must focus on patient and care excellence as opposed to luxury.