IMTJadmin - 07/03/2008 12:04
The current expansion of the medical-travel industry will lead to an oversupply of facilities all hoping to become centres of excellence
Let’s start with what we all agree on: the medical- tourism industry is expanding. Travel has never been less expensive and facilities around the world never more ready and willing to attract patients. For years, there have been regular flows of patients – from the Gulf to London and the US, for instance – but looking at the facilities that are coming on line in the next few years, it’s hard not to feel concern.
Indeed, with the most high-profile, and well organised example – Dubai Healthcare City, currently the source of a great deal of excitement – famous names such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and John Hopkins have signed up to be partners in the project. Also, the Jumeirah hotel group is planning to be one of several hotel chains on the site. The objectives behind the project are laudable: to ensure quality healthcare for the people of the UAE, Gulf States and Middle East; to develop leadership in medical education; to create a system to support research and development in healthcare and life sciences; and to create an environment that supports both high-quality healthcare delivery and the wellbeing of families. Also, and this is the crucial point, it is to establish an economically viable and sustainable integrated health community based on a partnership of the private and public sector.
Nobody is doubting the determination behind all of this, and if any development is to succeed, it is this one, which is why it is a robust enough example to withstand a little examination. Put bluntly, the delivery of the objectives of Dubai Healthcare City will take more than just vision and money. It will take patients. And so to that simple question that cuts to the heart of the matter: where will the patients come from?
The traditional route of Gulf patients has been to London and the US. They do this not because they enjoy travel, but because the hospitals of the Gulf, modern and well equipped as they are, do not have the necessary specialists in certain areas. The reason is obvious. A top-end hospital requires a large tertiary population to provide enough patients for its specialist doctors. For all the criticism that is leveled against the health service in the UK, it has a population of 66m to keep it going. The Gulf States have minute home populations, with immigrant populations larger, but still small, so for complicated procedures, the governments of the Gulf send the patients abroad. They might not like having to do so, but with the welfare of their nationals uppermost in their minds, that is what they do.
Gulf patients may decide to go to Dubai instead of the US, of course, but both Saudia Arabia and Qatar also have similar plans to build enormous platforms for their own nationals and for the nationals of other Gulf States, so there will be plenty of competition for these government-funded patients. All of these facilities will require very high patient throughput. Given the population they will be serving, will they be able to achieve the very high healthcare consistency they are aiming for, the sort the very wealthy in those parts of the world are going to trust?
Then there is the rest of the world to consider and the number of providers who are building hospitals for this particular market. India is targeting the market and has a good and large medical set-up where they can do things at a fraction of the cost; Thailand is already well involved in this market, of course; and Singapore has a well-respected hospital sector. So with these three countries already offering very high-quality hospitals, and there already being people with a cultural preference to go to the US, Switzerland or London (particularly the latter, since a lot of Gulf nationals have been travelling there all their lives), can it be said with confidence that there is enough business to go round? The question with these big new developments is: are they really going to be able to sustain these places?
Yes, there will be a lot of holidaymakers out there and, yes, Dubai is a major transport hub (and will become even more so), but health tourism would have to be on a huge scale before it consistently brought in enough acutely ill cardiac patients, for example, to keep high-quality doctors busy. We should also remember that this is an industry that is reliant on low-cost travel, and that’s something that a number of governments seem to be on the point of discouraging because of environmental concerns. Dubai has proved the naysayers wrong many times before, but for these other providers, who can say whether there business plans are too optimistic?
