Zimbabwe medical tourism is currently only outbound. There may be opportunities to promote the country as a destination for localised medical tourism, if some futuristic thinking is applied, suggests Ian Youngman.
Pre-pandemic, Zimbabwe had a tourism industry with over 2 million visitors a year, mostly from Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Botswana. Until now the only medical tourism in the country has been outbound, generally to South Africa and India.
Healthcare and hospitality: stronger together
There are parallels between the medical care and tourism industries. The tourism sector, particularly hotels, benchmark the level of customer service and amenities by grading stars, with five being the high-end resorts to the worst being the budget motels. Healthcare benchmarks quality of care, often with very little input from patients and frequently leaving out cultural considerations.
But if the community could choose between going to a five-star medical tourism facility locally instead of the nearest public health facility, could that shift or raise the standards of the way healthcare is delivered?
Combining medicine and tourism together offers advantages that each industry alone may not be able to achieve without the partnership.
The health industry could use the vast experience gained in the hospitality sector. It could for example provide long-term extended stay housing post-surgery in an ecosystem that combines skilled nursing care and a healing environment that offers renewal after a successful knee surgery or kidney transplant offered at a much lower cost. Learning from the high-end tourism market, this care could take place in an environment tailored to each patient’s total health needs (in mind, body and spirit) and is inclusive of cultural differences and expectations.
The places with the greatest potential for change in healthcare are developing nations, where health systems have dire challenges and are looking to re-invent and redesign care to become sustainable and futuristic. This presents an opportunity to leapfrog old healthcare models.
A destination for localised medical tourism?
The pandemic halted cross-border medical travel and re-opening offers the opportunity for localised medical tourism to emerge where the same main drivers for growth can be used to create a new model with a local approach. The re-birth of medical tourism that is localised could be a model that overcomes future pandemics and is a sustainable, resilient one.
Zimbabwe could be the ideal home for medical tourism facilities that allow the local community to have options outside the nationalised health system.
The country has a good education system, so it would be straightforward to set up an accelerated learning programme to empower local citizens with the necessary care skills. Other services that can easily be established include dental services, and hip and knee replacements that require extensive rehabilitation and post-operative care.
Localised medical tourism would only work, however, if all stakeholders, particularly health insurance companies, the government, private health sector and health educational institutions, are fully on board and fully committed in the creation of partnerships. But if this happens, Zimbabwe could become an African leader in this sector.
This could challenge the traditional Western models of healthcare and offer something more relevant to the new African middle-class. There is also potential to align Western medicine with traditional African medicine, with help from China’s experience in expanding Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Offering local healthcare with partnerships would mirror what is already happening across Africa in insurance, finance and transport. Countries are becoming less reliant on European, UK or USA based businesses, instead developing local Pan-African ones. This would also tie in with how African tourism is developing to focus more on intra-African travel and partnerships with China.
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