From liposuction in Athens to an eye
operation in Dubai, the lucrative market in medical tourism is on the up,
tempting ever more countries to look for ways to profit from foreign patient
care.
"Everyone
wants their share of the pie," Sanjiv Malik, director of DM Healthcare, a
Dubai-based network of hospitals, said at a recent conference on medical
tourism attended by more than 300 professionals here.
The
"pie" is getting bigger. Nearly three million patients go abroad for
medical treatment every year.
Turnover
is expected to total 100 billion dollars in 2012, compared with 79 billion in
2010, and increase to 130 billion by 2015, according to global consultancy
firm, KPMG.
The
flows of medical tourists looking for cheaper and often quicker treatment than
they can receive at home are traditionally well defined.
Mexico
draws US patients, while Thailand, India or Malaysia are the key destinations
for Asians, and Hungarian dental care tends to be highly sought-after
generally.
Germany
draws wealthy Russians as well as nationals from the Gulf; well-off Africans go
to France for medical care while residents of Latin America go to the US city
of Miami.
Keith
Pollard, of the specialist internet site Treatment Abroad, said that, generally
speaking, "medical tourism is not global, it's regional".
However
a growing number of countries and hospitals are aiming to turn it global.
In
Turkey "the government has taken the initiative to be one of the
players" in a market which until now was dominated by the private sector,
said Emin Cakmak, head of the Turkish medical tourism committee.
It has
launched a demolition programme of old hospitals replacing them with facilities
mostly destined for foreigners, likely to be patients from Arab and Gulf
states.
Dubai,
keen to attract custom from neighbouring countries, has its own "medical
zone".
"Dubai
was traditionally a country which sent patients (abroad), now it wants to host
them," Enric Mayolas, who manages the Barcelona Centro Medico which seeks
to draw in foreign patients for about 20 hospitals in the Spanish city, said.
But
Pollard warned that Dubai's chances of success could be limited, identifying a
problem that was common to other small countries wanting to become medical
tourism destinations.
"Lots
of Arab patients travel to Germany or the UK. Why? Because Germany has an 80
million population, doctors can practice, do research and get grants," he
said.
Christian
Ott-Sessay, of the German hospital group, Vivantes, acknowledges that
competition is stiff.
"But
the market is so big that it's not competition at the expense of each
other," he said.
Vivantes
is in the throes of equipping some of its Berlin clinics with "comfort
rooms" for foreign patients with hotel staff to take care of their
non-medical needs.
Berlin
has also set up a hotline for visiting patients and especially their families
to help them quickly organise non-medical tourism activities such as a shopping
trip or visit to a museum.
Meanwhile,
the Athens-based private hospital centre, Hygeia Group, focuses on tourism as a
selling point.
"Many
people will come from Asia because they also want to see the Acropolis,"
George Soras, of Hygeia's marketing service, said.
He also
said that prices were 70 percent lower than the rest of the EU or US for cosmetic
surgery or artificial limbs.
However,
the sector faces a raft of potential problems and risks.
Complications,
ethical questions and the confidentiality of data all have to be taken into
consideration, Malik said.
Pollard
also acknowledged that "the aftercare is lacking".
"We
have to fix that if we want medical travel to grow," he warned.
AFP
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