Reversing outbound medical tourism

FE Team | Published: November 25, 2024 21:24:41

It is hardly surprising that an amount of $4.0 billion is annually spent by this country's people on medical treatment abroad. Disclosing this at a seminar titled "Reversing the Outbound Healthcare Tourism" held at the office of the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) in the capital, experts have suggested provision for world-class healthcare facilities with physicians of the top order rendering service there. Now medical/healthcare tourism and medical treatment abroad are essentially same but yet the connotations have somewhat different perspectives. Medical tourism smacks of commercialisation of healthcare whereas looking for cure for health complications abroad conveys that either the particular treatment is not available or unsatisfactory at home for various reasons. By medical tourism, usually it is understood that the more affluent class in society would visit reputed hospitals abroad even for routine health check-ups and this in most cases entails visits to tourist sites in the host countries.
Now one of the observations made at the seminar is particularly significant. This concerns the middle class people's growing interest in medical treatment abroad. Why? It is because the entire healthcare ecosystem, the DCCI president observed, is not attuned to the need and expectation of patients seeking relief from health ailments. Here the emphasis is on ecosystem which does not take shape on its own. This has to be built bit by bit with physicians, nurses, technologists, members of the general staff working as a cohesive unit to make patients and their near and dear ones feel that the clinic or hospital cares to the utmost. When there is collusion between middlemen and members of hospital staff marked by widespread irregularities in admission to hospitals or allocation of beds and cabins, the impression of a hostile healthcare facility is created. There are harassment by security guards, wardens and others and also a lack of proper attention by physicians galore.
Government or public hospitals are particularly notorious in this regard but private hospitals have their own methods of making their facilities impervious and hostile. With rare exceptions, these are habituated to fleecing families of patients. In several cases treatment there is costlier than in hospitals abroad and together with the travel cost outbound treatment proves economical. Some of the government hospitals at least have their excuses that the rush is so heavy that it becomes humanly impossible to give proper attention to their patients. This certainly calls for developing hospitals in districts and upazilas with proper amenities and creating the right ecosystem for adequately qualified and experienced physicians to stay at residential accommodation there.
Reversing medical tourism may prove a big task right at this moment. Even the much-hyped specialised facilities at the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University are reported to be lying unutilised mostly because patients show little interest in seeking treatment there. This, in fact, is an indirect expression of no-confidence in the country's best healthcare arrangement and by extension the system itself. This is unacceptable. It is incumbent on the senior physicians to restore confidence in patients about the service the former render. They can start the process from the private chamber where they must give the patients to understand that they really care for the ailing humanity. The next step would be to create healthcare ecosystem at the hospitals where they now casually do some perfunctory duties