South Asian region has potential to promote medical tourism: experts

South Asian region has significant potential to promote medical tourism and can save billion of dollars annually by mutual cooperation, health experts said on Tuesday. Discussion with health experts revealed that annually thousands of patients from the South Asian region visit the developed countries for medical treatment and spend billions of dollars foreign exchange which can be saved by mutual cooperation in the health sector.
According to these experts, a number of patients from Pakistan visit Singapore, Thailand and other Asian countries, especially India due to cheaper medical treatment. According to these experts, a room of a good private sector hospital costs Rs 20,000 per day in Pakistan while same in India costs Rs 7,000. Medical tests in India are also cheaper than Pakistan and physician's fees as compared to top physician in Pakistan are low in India so keeping in view these advantages patients prefer to go to India for their treatment.
Moreover, in a developed country like America average heart bypass costs $120,000 while in India and Pakistan it ranges between $5,000-7,000 respectively. They said mutual cooperation will not only save local resources but will also enable the regional giants to generate foreign exchanges as South Asia has produced best medical practitioners who are serving abroad.
Dr Javed Akram, Vice Chancellor Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Medical University Islamabad talking to this correspondent on the topic said that entire South Asia has almost similar culture, life style and is facing similar diseases such as Congo fever and Thalassemia.
He stressed the need for mutual cooperation among the regional countries and said that the regional collaboration in research, common curricula, students, and faculty exchange initiatives are a must to fight common health challenges. "We need to have common database on diseases, common alert on endemic diseases, which will not only help save valuable foreign exchange but can also improve local expertise in health sector", he added.
Akram said the Prime Minister recently approved a project for construction of state of the art health facilities in Islamabad with an estimated cost of Rs 20 billion, which also include setting up of an independent burn unit, bone marrow transplant, liver transplant and treatment centers for diseases.
Middle class people from Pakistan prefer liver transplantation in India as India has 13 liver transplantation centers as compared to Pakistan's one such centre, however, now authorities have decided to set up more centers and offers attractive salaries to the surgeons, he said.
Professor Dr Atiq-ul-Rehman explained, "World-wide medical tourism is a $580 billion dollar industry. We have tremendous potential in health cooperation. When we talk about regional cooperation, we should set our bar high. We need to ensure transparency and patient care in our public sector hospitals".
He said that medicine prices in general are lower in Pakistan, yet people visit India for major surgeries and treatment as it is much cheaper there as compared to Pakistan. Medical treatment does not include only the cost of medicine, but other services as well as medical tests which account for 30 percent of the total treatment cost, physician's fee, clinic and hospitalisation charges account for 55 percent of the total treatment cost.
All these expenses relatively are cheaper in India so patients prefer going there for the treatment of different diseases, he said. Dr Atiq said that the government needs to regulate the clinical laboratories as they are heavily charging from the poor patients. Platelet assessment for dengue, a few years back, cost around Rs 100 but now it costs in the range of Rs 150 to Rs 500 per patients varying from lab to lab, the phenomena must be checked. Regulatory environment is poor across the country.
Clinical tests at prominent private sector hospitals like Shaukat Khanum and Aga Khan Hospital, Al-Shifa and others are much higher than the labs having top quality equipment and human resource. "Transaction of money is a big issue while getting treatment abroad. There is a lack of institutional links between hospitals in different South Asian countries which needs to be improved," Dr Abdul Hadi a heart specialist said. He said that still most of the Afghans prefer treatment in Pakistan due to easily accessibility but now India has stared attracting them by providing special incentives such as Rs 5,000 air ticket from Kabul to Delhi.
"India is getting 50 percent patients from Afghanistan, 30 percent from Bangladesh and 20 percent from other South Asian countries", he said adding unfortunately the potential of cooperation in health sector in the region has not been tapped. Dr Mukhtar Ahmad, Chairman HEC said we need to use education as diplomatic tool. Education diplomacy can be a successful tool in creating healthy cooperation among the regional countries. Basic and applied science need to work together.