The healthcare industry is booming across Southeast Asia. Private hospitals in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and even Ho Chi Minh City are flooded with patients from around the region and increasingly from the Middle East, Europe and North America.
They come for annual checkups, heart bypasses, hip replacements, kidney transplants, laser eye surgery and every other kind of medical treatment conceivable, including sex change operations.
And they do it because the quality of treatment is as good, if not better, than they can get in their own countries, and because it costs much less than at home.
The thriving ‘medical tourism’ industry is expected to continue to boom for the foreseeable future because of a heightened awareness of the benefits of quality healthcare and because the world’s ageing populations will require more frequent medical checkups and treatments.
Ten years ago, consumer expenditure on healthcare services and goods by Asians stood at US$90 billion. Today, it is estimated that it will more than double to $188 billion by 2013.
Malaysia, which has focused on markets in the Middle East and China, expects medical tourism to generate revenues of $650 million next year.
Thailand, another thriving healthcare centre, already treats more than 1 million foreign patients every year – and even tiny Singapore hopes to hit that target by 2012 and generate $3 billion in revenue in the process.
Most nursing graduates choose to work in private hospitals because of better pay and work conditions.
But there is one potential hiccup to this wonderfully rosy picture: Where will all the trained nurses and ancillary staff to look after this massive influx of patients come from?
Step forward Malaysia’s Masterskill University College of Health Sciences.
This organisation, which has several nursing college campuses, astutely spotted the boom in medical tourism and robustly stepped forward to provide training courses for medical staff and thus fill a seemingly ever expanding and lucrative market.
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