Hadassah head calls for medical tourism to be 'national priority"
Treatment of foreigners could bring in $100 m.
By JUDY SIEGEL
The Jerusalem Post
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Medical tourism the treatment of foreigners in Israeli medical
institutions can be more than tripled within five years to bring in $100 million annually, said Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director-general of the Hadassah Medical Organization on Monday. Mor-Yosef, whose two university medical centers in Jerusalem treat quite a few foreign patients, said that medical tourism must become a ³national target² to raise income that can be used to supply better health care and disease prevention to those who cannot afford it.
Mor-Yosef was speaking at the opening of the first-ever Israel Medical Convention held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, organized by the Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) with help from the Israel Medical Association and the Ha¹ir chain of local weeklies. The organizers, who offered nearly eight hours of lectures and panel discussions by leading physicians and others at no charge to the more than 600 participants (about half of them medical professionals and the rest from the general public,said they hope to make it an annual event to bring the understanding of
medicine closer to the citizenry.
He called on the Health Ministry and the Treasury to finance a marketing campaign abroad to promote medical tourism. The HMO director-general told the participants, who included Health Minister Ya¹acov Ben-Yizri and Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, that a growing number of countries have set a goal of increasing medical tourism to raise extra income. These include Poland, France, Turkey, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa India, Thailand and Malaysia. But although Israel offers world-class medicine, he continued, medical tourism today constitutes less than one percent of Israel¹s tourism income, with only 10,000 foreign patients spending $30 million a year on treatments, mostly in 10 medical institutions. Local hospitals’ hotel services are not the best, but they are
improving.
Unlike many of these countries, in Israel, the local population receive the same high level of care as the foreign tourists who come here specially to undergo operations and other treatments. Mor-Yosef said Israel, with its high level of technology and medical knowhow, can use the additional income from treating foreigners to reduce inequality in health care. Poverty, he says, kills, as those with low income suffer more from chronic diseases and observe lifestyles that are deleterious to health.
A full report on the convention will appear on Sunday¹s Health Page.
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
Health and Science Reporter and Software Reviewer
The Jerusalem Post