Ruosu LIU

Medical tourism in Thailand

Department of Biomedical Sciences

College of Life sciences

Ruosu LIU

Introduction

My name is LIU and I am a third year student from biomedical sciences department. I am interested in medical issues in developing countries so I usually do research about those issues. This time, my topic is medical tourism in Thailand. I introduce What is medical tourism, what kind of hospital in Thailand offer this service, users, why is it so popular in my video. My target is people who know some basic medical knowledge and has common interest with me. During making the video, what I felt difficult is that I couldn’t find many useful information and I have to judge whether the information is believable or not. And because this video is short, I only did some simple introduction and couldn’t do any deep discussion.

Key words

medical tourism, Thailand

Content of my video

Speaking of Thailand, what’s the impression? What comes up first in you mind? The temples, spicy food, or beach? Sure, all of them are Thailand. As we all know, Thailand is one of the most popular sightseeing place in the world. Tourism has bring them 11% of GDP at 2015. But today, I will focus on a special part of the tourism.

Have you heard about this word, medical tourism. If not, can you image? What do you think it is? Do you think it’s message? Or beauty? Or gender change? These things in Thailand are famous and maybe they are medical things. But this time I’m talking about something different. Medical tourism means going to abroad to get medical service. So here it means people from other counties going to Thailand to get normal medical service including medical check up and surgery and so on.Thailand is said that it is the birthplace of medical tourism. At 2013, there are 1.04 million people from other countries went to Thailand to get medical care. This number is about 4% of whole international traveler.

I want to find out who is using this medical tourism and why do they use it. First, who? According to my research, the users can be divided into two parts. One is people from neighboring developing countries, like Myanmar and Bangladesh, the other part is people from developed countries like America and japan. And the reason why they use it is different between these two parts. There are two main reasons of why people from developing counties go to Thailand. They are the high medical level and the high quality of service. The high medical level are showed by doctors and equipment. in Thailand, not all of the hospitals offer the medical tourism service, only some big private hospital offer this service. All of the hospitals have excellent doctors who are graduated from medical school in japan or America, and get trained in those countries. Then the hospitals have word-class equipment. The high quality of service is showed by the wards which are as comfortable as hotel rooms, and the good care from nurses. There is a reason why they offer such a high quality service. Those hospitals which offer medical tourism are actually listed companies. it means that they are running a business, and their customers are foreign patients. Their purpose is to offer good service so that they can earn more money. On the other hand, the most important reason of why people from developed countries choose Thailand is the low cost. According to the estimation, the medical fee in Thailand is almost only 20% of America. For example, if an American people go Thailand to have a surgery. This people will cost the ticket of flight and hotel and medical fee. Even you add all this costs up, it costs less than having a surgery in America.

The reason why medical tourism get so developed in Thailand is that the government supports it. Their purpose is to get foreign currency to supply their own national health care.

Now I have found out what I am curious about medical tourism in Thailand. Have you learnt something through this video? However, thank you for watching and hope you liked this video.

References

1.METI countryreport_Thailand

2.UNTWO tourism highlight 2014edition