Thursday, January 13, 2011

Is medical tourism safe?

To keep things simple, this blog is moving to the IMTJ web site. You can find the Health Tourism Blog here, in future. Here's an extract of the latest blog post on "Is medical tourism safe?"

A significant proportion of medical tourism and medical travel is driven by people seeking established and proven treatments in countries where the cost of the treatment or operation is much lower than in their home country. Within this segment of the market, the focus of patient safety is upon the hospital, clinic or doctor who is carrying out the treatment. Can the patient be confident that the healthcare provider has the necessary expertise and experience to carry out the procedure? The question... “Does this treatment actually work?” does not arise.

For proven treatments, the hospitals, clinics and doctors (and medical tourism facilitators) can reassure the patient by providing proof of qualifications, accreditations; experience and so on.... and in some cases may be prepared to provide data on clinical outcomes. Unfortunately, this is all too often lacking. Patients are often asked to take on trust the claims of the healthcare provider, particularly in those countries that do not have national standards and systems for the collection of comparative clinical outcome data or independent review and analysis. Even an international accreditation such as JCI is not a guarantee of quality, nor an assessment of how good a hospital actually is at delivering safe and successful treatments.

So, in established areas of medical travel such as cosmetic surgery, dental treatment and elective surgery there is still much work to be done to convince potential medical tourists that treatment abroad is a safe option (or at least as safe as within their home country).

Read the full article at IMTJ: Go to "Is medical tourism safe?"

5 comments:

sydneyprincesscruises said...

"medical tourism and medical travel is driven by people seeking established and proven treatments in countries where the cost of the treatment or operation is much lower than in their home country." this sentence gives me an idea about the medical tourism seems us yourself as a trail to test the treatment. For my personal view, it is not quite safe.

Anonymous said...

a medical travel facilitator would ease the worry and stress of finding the best healthcare for whatever healthcare a patient would require. So, I do believe that medical tourism is safe.

Fiji Deals said...

Yes, Medical Tourism CAN be safe.Medical tourism is growing popular today with the affordable plastic surgery at an excellent quality. But for some people, the growing concern is the safety because of its very low prices. Plastic surgery itself involves risk, that is why patients want to make sure the procedure they're going to have will be safe in other countries.

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