Building a hospital rarely leads to patients beating a path to your door

For emerging destinations, new hospital and facility development is sometimes seen as the route to success in medical tourism. But governments and investors need to realise that the road to the promised land of medical tourism isn’t just about building the road…

As a journalist, I read hundreds of press releases each week. As a general rule, it is quite depressing trying to find actual news on medical tourism that may interest readers! This is particularly true of the Arab/Gulf region; there is a standard type of press release that can be summed up as “we’re spending £10 million building a new hospital to increase medical tourism”.

There is a huge demand for new hospitals in many Asian and Arab countries, to serve a rapidly increasing local population. But there appears to be some magic formula, which I have yet to discover, which links building a new hospital to attracting international patients.

This is the result of confusing correlation with causation.  For example ‘we build 10 new hospitals’ and  ‘our population is increasing 10% each year’ is a related fact, and the latter is partly a cause of former.

‘We are building 10 new hospitals’ and  ‘we expect to get more medical tourists ‘ is not cause and effect, merely hope and expectation.

• Right – if there is no spare medical capacity, there will be no medical tourists.
• Wrong – if there is spare medical capacity, this will increase the number of medical tourists.

Looking back at the first ever, then on paper, IMTJ, there was an article by the then editor ‘Build it and they will come’.

This article looked at the rapid hospital building programme in the Middle East and questioned the assumption by governments that shiny new hospitals with the latest equipment in the middle of nowhere and often quite high prices would somehow bring in millions of medical tourists. At the time, the feature was criticised as being “doom and gloom”.

Figures of ‘ international patients’ in countries where not only are there millions of holiday travellers and business travellers, but anything up to 90% of the working population are expatriates, often low paid workers, add confusion. But once you strip these out, it is plain that none of the countries with a massive hospital building programme has attracted significant numbers of medical tourists. In fact, many continue to struggle to stop their citizens going to other countries for treatment, often supported by state funding .

If you look at the investment ratio of cost to international patient revenue, most of these new hospitals will have to achieve near capacity for 20 years to make a profit.

New hospitals are vital for many countries, but confusing the building of a new hospital in a region where costs are high and the medical track record is poor with a programme promoting medical tourism is a fantasy.

Sadly, it is not just in the Middle East and Asia that this magical formula is still promoted. Africa is now adopting the ‘Build it and they will come’ approach.

The story is an attractive one for poorly informed politicians and government officials. “We can solve our country’s healthcare problems and increase tourism by building a few new hospitals”. There are many around the medical tourism sector who will be happy to support this approach and argue the case for the government.  There’s plenty of money to be made during the development phase.  But those advisors will be long gone when the hospitals open and the government and investors realise that the road to the promised land of medical tourism isn’t just about building the road. It’s about knowing where you are going… and why.