Essay On Medical Tourism

Medical Tourism in India

The word tourism is generally associated with travel for recreation, leisure, religious, family or business purposes, usually for a limited duration across the globe or it may be at some another place within the same country. However over the period of time the term tourism has gone through tremendous changes as people now travel not only for leisure and recreation but they move to other countries to get health benefits. The global demand for healthcare services has been increased in the past few years due to demographic factors such as increased longevity and rising birth rates, growing health awareness among people, increasing demand for good quality healthcare services and ever growing expertise in the field of medicine. People are now willing to travel that extra mile to receive treatments at affordable prices. This has given rise to the term ‘Medical Tourism’. Around seven million patients are said to be travelling each year to receive medical care. Rising healthcare costs, rising demand for cosmetic and dental

India believes in slogan “Atithi Devo Bhava” which means that a guest is equivalent to a god ‘ assures service providers to provide end-to-end services. These include speciality treatment, low cost consultation and treatment, no waiting period for treatment and availability of advanced equipments at reasonable price. The Indian medical tourism industry is growing by 30 percent a year. It caters to the requirements of patients chiefly from the West Asia, Middle East Africa and to some extent US and Europe. In year 2012, maximum number of medical foreign tourist arrivals from Bangladesh followed by Sri Lanka (figure 2). According to the Indian High Commission, Indian hospitals received 18,000 Nigerians on medical visas in 2012, 47% of the Nigerians were in India to receive medical treatment and spent approximately $260 million