Foresight
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Read moreTitle: Mass Medical Tourism
Author: Future Agenda | https://www.futureagenda.org
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https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/mass-medical-tourism/
Medical tourism goes mainstream as low-cost cardiac surgery and broader healthcare provision join dentistry and cosmetic surgery to have global impact.
Switzerland has long been a centre for medical holidays – a place where the rich have gone for relaxation and treatment. Over the past few decades, it also became a centre for more surgical vacations, often focused on providing cosmetic enhancement for its customers. In a similar vein, both South Africa and Brazil are also well known as places to go to get good quality cosmetic surgery. London, LA and Miami are also renowned as centres of cosmetic excellence. Today, new locations such as Dubai, Venezuela, Thailand, Jamaica and the Philippines all variously compete in respective niches as the places for the two-week holiday with an inclusive tummy tuck or breast enhancement. They have all been recruiting leading plastic surgeons and building hotels-cum-hospitals to provide cosmetic services at competitive prices.
While cosmetic surgery has largely paved the way, other areas of medicine have followed suit over the past few years, as high-quality services have been made available in key locations at low cost and so have become attractive destinations for people from different countries. Dentistry has been a primary area here: Hungary fast became a centre for dental tourism in Europe, as has Bangkok in Asia. Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama have all played a similar role in Central America. In these areas, high-quality dental work at relatively low cost in attractive destinations is provided for those with the money and the desire to travel. In 2007, over 100,000 UK residents went aboard for medical treatment, of which 43% sought dental procedures and 30% went for cosmetic surgery. The average spend for such trips was just under $4,000 per head.
Today there is a shift happening, not just in quality and cost but also in the complexity of operations being made available and, going forward, the niche activity of medical tourism will go increasingly mainstream as low-cost cardiac surgery and broader healthcare provision are added into the mix. New business models and new areas of focus are creating new destinations.
In many cases, it is India that is leading the way. Most significantly at first were the advances made by Aravind Eye Hospitals with cataract operations. Adopting process techniques from the fast food industry, Dr G. Venkataswamy, founder of Aravind Eye Care System, has pioneered change in the speed, scale and cost of operations. Primarily aimed at making life-changing eye surgery available to a wide range of the Indian population, the five Aravind Eye Hospitals in India conduct over 300,000 operations a year, costing on average $50 rather than the usual $500. Today, as the success of the business model scales up, India is also becoming a centre for medical tourism as patients from the US and Europe fly in for an operation that is done as well as anywhere at a fraction of the price.
Read moreFrom
The World In 2020