Concept of ‘health tourism’ and its impact on the NHS.

A recent development in the global healthcare sector is the concept of medical tourism, a new phenomenon, where people travel to other countries to access quality healthcare services. Over the last few years, the scope of medical tourism included specialised health services, tourist attractions, and other service offerings. For example, Dubai and Singapore started to invest heavily on the research & development in biotechnology to support the medical tourism industry and built services around clinical trials, lab services and others. Some countries like the UK and Singapore are turning into a destination for specific medical treatment procedures and position themselves as low-cost hubs for visiting the country as well as having the treatment done at the same time.

We argue that only a few countries are able to have a competitive advantage with their core competencies in the healthcare sector to deliver high-quality medical treatments at low cost. Similarly, our analysis shows that there is a steady increase in inbound and outbound medical tourism in the United Kingdom, affluent patients from China, India and the East Europe are choosing the UK as health tourism hotspots.

Our findings concluded that there will be an exodus of foreign patients visiting the UK for treatment and bring revenues supporting the tourism industry. These changes will offer new opportunities to the healthcare industry and will have a big impact on the resources available from NHS. The doctors, nurses and health care workers should be trained across various cultures to service foreign nationals, well versed in the global standards in medical care and build technical & human skills to deliver a great experience to the patient during the course of the stay. The new roles of the healthcare professionals will push for customised services for each patient and this might result in stress-related problems for healthcare professionals.

The UK has registered a mild growth in the inbound patients for treatment in the country last year and NHS estimated that this figure is set to grow in the next two years. Therefore, the governments and hospital authorities should support the healthcare industry with innovative patient-driven policies to help NHS and private sector healthcare providers to manage the additional pressure on health services, their responsibilities which has the enourmous potential for growth, harnessing medical tourism sector as an opportunity for economic development.

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