Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi: Specialist Care on Al Maryah Island

The hospital that now stands on Al Maryah Island began as an agreement signed in the presence of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and now President of the UAE. Under its terms, drawn up in September 2006, Mubadala and Cleveland Clinic, the American institution founded in Ohio in 1921, undertook to establish a specialist hospital in the capital, to be run by Cleveland Clinic to its own standards and built around its group model of medicine.

Nearly nine years passed before the first patients arrived. The Eye Institute opened its doors in March 2015, and the other specialties followed in stages through the spring. That December, as the country celebrated its National Day, King Mohammed VI of Morocco and Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed formally declared the hospital open. By then it had already handled more than 44,000 appointments.

Its most memorable night came two years later. On the evening of 5 December 2017, a surgical team began an operation that ran into the early hours of the following morning, and by the time it was finished Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi had completed the first full heart transplant ever performed in the UAE. Within two months the same hospital had carried out the country’s first full liver transplant from a deceased donor.

Those two operations marked a change, from travelling abroad for complex treatment to finding it close at hand, that runs through the hospital’s first decade.

 

An American Model in the Capital

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi now forms part of the M42 healthcare group, though its methods remain recognisably those of Ohio. What sets it apart is less the building than the way the medicine is practised. Physicians are gathered into institutes arranged around related conditions, rather than into separate departments that patients must navigate one by one. The eight institutes range from the heart and the brain to digestive disease and cancer, and between them they offer over 50 medical and surgical specialties across 26 operating theatres. A patient with a complicated heart condition may therefore meet cardiologists, imaging specialists and surgeons who are accustomed to working on the same case.

Its staff, meanwhile, are notably international. At the time of its tenth anniversary, in March 2025, it employed more than 5,700 caregivers drawn from over 80 nationalities.

 

A Decade of Transplants

That heart transplant was, in fact, the programme’s second milestone of 2017; it had begun in September with a kidney from a deceased donor. From there it went on to make Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi the UAE’s first multi-organ transplant centre, and its surgeons have since performed more than 800 transplants.

The most demanding came in October 2024, when a team of 13, among them four cardiothoracic surgeons, spent more than eight hours carrying out the country’s first combined heart and double-lung transplant. The patient, a 56-year-old Emirati woman, had pulmonary hypertension. Operations of that kind depend not only on surgical skill but on months of preparation and aftercare, and it is precisely that continuity which is easier to sustain at home.

 

The Heart and the Brain

Cardiac care has grown alongside the transplant work. Within a decade, surgeons there had undertaken over 6,500 cardiac operations, including almost 2,000 coronary bypass procedures, and the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi has designated it a Centre of Excellence for Adult Cardiac Surgery.

Its Neurological Institute has followed a similar course. In 2019 it brought deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease to the UAE, and the Department of Health has since recognised it as a Centre of Excellence for Stroke. In February 2024 the American Stroke Association, part of the American Heart Association, awarded it Comprehensive Stroke Center certification, one of the highest levels of recognition available to hospitals treating complex stroke.

 

A Centre for Cancer

Cancer care, by contrast, was given a building of its own. In March 2023 the hospital opened the Fatima bint Mubarak Center, named after Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, the Mother of the Nation. Modelled on Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Center, it covers some 19,000 square metres and gathers screening, diagnostics, chemotherapy and radiation treatment under one roof, with 24 private infusion rooms.

Its opening two years were busy ones, with more than 55,000 oncology clinic visits and over 22,000 chemotherapy infusions recorded by March 2025. In September of this year the Department of Health named Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi one of the emirate’s three Oncology Centres of Excellence for Breast Cancer, a designation assessed on clinical outcomes, patient experience, safety, staff competence, research and accreditation.

The arrangement matters most to those facing months of treatment, whose consultations, scans and sessions can take place within one institution rather than across several, sparing them and their families a good deal of travelling.

 

Beyond the Consulting Room

Serious illness rarely affects one person alone, and some thought has gone into the needs of patients’ companions. Rosewood Abu Dhabi is linked to the building by a dedicated corridor, and visiting relatives are also directed towards the Four Seasons Hotel on the island. Staff work in Arabic and English, with medical translators available around the clock for patients who prefer another language.

Patients arriving from abroad can call on a dedicated international service, which arranges transport, helps with scheduling and coordinates medical records before and after a stay.

 

Life on the Island

Beyond the hospital, Al Maryah Island is home to Abu Dhabi Global Market, the emirate’s international financial centre, as well as The Galleria and two hotels, so that offices, shops and specialist medicine lie within a short distance of one another.

When families decide where to live in the capital, access to hospital care sits naturally beside schools, commuting and privacy. For those who would rather live within easy reach, Four Seasons Private Residences Abu Dhabi offers 124 apartments in a 34-storey building, fully managed by Four Seasons, a combination that suits owners who divide their year between several cities. Proximity does not, of course, alter how appointments are made, but it does make routine visits far simpler.

 

The Numbers So Far

Ten years after the first patients arrived, the hospital had treated over 6.8 million of them and performed more than 175,000 surgical procedures, over a million patients having passed through its doors in 2024 alone. It also supports active research, with more than 200 studies under way in early 2025, and more than 2,100 trainees had completed its clinical programmes.

 

Care Close to Home

When that agreement was signed in 2006, much of the treatment the hospital now offers would have meant a long journey for patients in the UAE. Today, a family on Al Maryah Island has the country’s first multi-organ transplant centre a short distance away. For a capital that has built so much of its future around finance, culture and the water’s edge, the hospital is a quieter achievement, and a reassuring one to have nearby.