| 1. | It’s medical tourism |
| Well, that’s what it is often called… but just like we say business travel and not business tourism, it’s more about the provision of healthcare services across international boundaries than about sprinkling healthcare on vacations. Casualties were evacuated to Singapore after the Bali bomb blasts, and ASEAN expatriates often go to Singapore for care beyond their local healthcare services. So, medical tourism is really only a small part of medical travel. Incidentally, after that cosmetic surgery, your surgeon will tell you “no sun, no sea, no sand” so don’t believe the brochures. | |
| 2. | It’s new and booming |
| It is a growing business but not quite so new. Singapore was already receiving some 370,000 healthcare visitors in 1997, and stories of patients (even heads of states) traveling there for medical care go back decades. In 2006, there were 410,000 visits to Singapore specifically for healthcare. As to the boom, guesstimates vary and credible statistics on medical travel are few. Hospitals routinely report hundreds of thousands of patients because they are not counting individual patients but separate episodes of care (once today, once tomorrow ? or even once to the consult, once to the lab, once to the pharmacy!). Some include the local expatriates and leisure/other travelers who fall sick or fall down, which is hardly complimentary to the safety of the destination. | |
| 3. | Patients are going to cheap, low quality healthcare |
| Cheap it may be relative to some Western countries, but comparing healthcare quality is hard. Healthcare systems are so different and low costs in themselves do not mean low quality. Singapore spends less than four percent of GDP on healthcare but yet was ranked the best healthcare system in Asia by the World Health Organization and has more JCI-accredited facilities than any other country in Asia. To use a more specific comparator, the incidence of Ventilator-Associated Pneumonias in Singaporean ICUs averaged 2.53/1000 ventilator-days in 2005 (the lower the better) compared to 4.4 in USA (NNIS pooled). While the best healthcare in the world is undoubtedly in the USA, the average in Singapore beats out the average in USA. In any case, the world is now so flat that US facilities like Johns-Hopkins operate in Singapore as well. | |
| 4. | Asian healthcare destinations threaten the facilities of the West |
| Sounds logical, but consider the relative sizes of the economies. USA alone has a two trillion dollar economy, while the entire annual foreign medical revenue from deliberate medical travelers to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and India barely exceeds one billion. How much can be siphoned away when supply is limited? The true danger in medical travel is not to the sending medical economies but to the receiving medical ecologies, as doctors are enticed away from public hospitals, prices escalate, foreign patients get preferential treatment and public healthcare systems become strained. Countries must pay attention to the public health implications of the medical travel industry, or risk hurting their own population and eventually their medical visitors as well. Globalization will happen. The risk for the overburdened payers in countries with expensive healthcare is that the early movers find the better quality healthcare for their insured/employees, and late adopters have nothing left. | |
| 5. | There are many excellent healthcare destinations in the world |
| Actually, there aren’t that many. Some countries have announced national programs and many have marketed themselves as great destinations, but few really deliver. Too many patients had successful surgeries but bad experiences because of poor service, unsafe city streets, or heart-rending street urchin beggars. Beyond excellent, safe and trustworthy clinical services, affordable costs and good customer service, patients need a warm and non-threatening environment, cultural acceptance, ease of travel, safety for themselves and their families, and even opportunities for recreation and shopping for their travel companions. Few places in the world truly provide their patients the peace of mind when health really matters. |
Source: www.singaporemedicine.com
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