South Africa can accommodate up a million medical tourists every year and is ideally placed to the become a destination of choice for medical and cosmetic surgical procedures, says Cawe Mahlati, organiser of the inaugural South African Health Tourism Congress (SAHTC) in Gauteng. Mahlati says a strong health sector could bring down the cost of healthcare in the country, at a time the country is seriously considering restructuring what the public and private healthcare sectors offer internally.
More than 300 delegates representing medical tourism agencies, hospitals and healthcare providers, dentists and doctors, government representatives and insurers attended the congress. The aim is to create a health tourism cluster, getting all parties to work together to market South Africa as a cost-effective, quality provider of medical and cosmetic procedures. In the last few years politicians and government bodies have offered no support or shown any intent to assist medical tourism. This will change as the congress has received the support of the government with both Deputy Health Minister Thokozile Xasa and Deputy Tourism Minister Molefi Sefularo speaking at the event. Xasa said that the government aims to complete a national strategy and implementation plan by the end of this year to develop the country as a destination for international medical tourism.
He also said that out of 9.5 million foreign tourist arrivals in the country last year, 410 000 were medical tourists, but organiser Mahlati is wary of trusting those figures. Trade estimates in recent years have consistently used a figure of only 20,000. She suggests that the creation of a health visa would make it easier to calculate real numbers. Xasa admitted that the country's service offering in medical tourism is sporadic,” The industry in its innate state is fragmented and consequently inefficient."
A pioneer in medical tourism, South Africa has long established itself as a destination for health tourists, with thousands of foreign patients electing to have cosmetic or medical procedures in local hospitals. But more organized rivals have overtaken it as marketing has mainly been left to agencies, with few hospitals prepared to promote their services.
The congress aims to stimulate the inbound health tourism market in South Africa. Deputy Minister of Health Molefi Sefularo said,” Although the private sector is the main beneficiary of health tourism, there is a slow stream of patients who are price sensitive and have seen the opportunity of using the public sector hospitals. There is much scope for collaboration between the medical, tourism, hospital and travel industries. It is therefore important for the public sector to utilize this opportunity in a co-ordinated manner, without negatively affecting access to the South African patients.South Africa has to position itself therefore as a destination of choice for medical healthcare ahead the 2010 FIFA World Cup."
South African Medical Association regulations prohibit commercial brokers from recommending patients to doctors, and restrict doctors from marketing their services directly or indirectly to the public.
The authorities sudden interest in medical tourism is due to an acceptance that leisure tourism in South Africa has reached saturation point, giving an impetus to new strategies that target medical and health tourism for high spending visitors.
