The Health Travelers

The Health Travelers

Cyril Perry is a 59 year old retiree who needed to get his hip replaced because he suffered from rheumatoid-arthritis .

Because of the long queues in the National Health Service in the UK he started searching online for better alternatives abroad .

After a full year of research he found two destinations : a hospital in Thailand and Apollo Speciality Hospital , Chennai .

He chose the one in Chennai , India because it is 5000 pounds cheaper than the one in Thailand .

Without doubt Cyril is not the only who travels abroad for surgeries and medical treatments .

Many people from rich countries like the USA travel to South Africa for Cosmetic Surgeries because they are way cheaper than home.

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A Saudi Arabian study report pointed out that in 2000 medical travelers from the Gulf region alone spent over $ 27 billion seeking treatment in various nations around the world.

The estimate is that healthcare market in the organization of Economic Cooperation and development countries alone is worth about and expected to go up to $ 4 trillion in 2005.

More importantly it is growing rapidly and turning out to be an immense business opportunity for nations that are positioning themselves correctly.

Last year just five Asian countries –Thailand , Malaysia , Jordan , Singapore and India – were able to attract over 1.3 million medical travelers and earned over $ 1 billion and it’s been growing since then for 20% per year .

Lithuania , Hong Kong and South Africa are emerging as big medical destinations and other nations including Croatia and Greece plan to make themselves attractive healthcare destinations .

Traveling abroad is not a modern phenomenon , it’s been around since ancient times . But in the past five years the movement has accelerated rapidly . It has developed a massive momentum for two critical reasons .

The first is , the demographics and the problems in the developed countries’ healthcare system .

The big problem is that their health needs increase exponentially . The number of doctors and nurses in the USA and the UK is not keeping pace with all the demands . This is creating the push factor .

Meanwhile , there is a pull factor being created by a handful of developing countries like Thailand and Malaysia that have good doctors and excellent facilities , and which are positioning themselves as medical destinations in order to boost their economies .

Cross-border travel for healthcare reasons is still a highly disorganized movement but nations are slowly waking up to its potential . In some countries the governments have taken the lead . In others agents specializing in medical tourism are driving the trend.

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Although the movement is still at its infancy , it has come under the radar of both World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization(WTO).

In the early 1990s WHO created the Social Sector Development Strategies , Inc. which specialized in global healthcare systems.