The Hindu Business Line : CII meet calls to boost medical tourism in Kerala

The two-day conference on Kerala Health Tourism 2006, organised by the CII in collaboration with the Kerala Government's Department of Tourism, has commenced here with a call to promote India as a medical tourism destination.

Inaugurating the conference, the State Tourism Minister, Mr K.C. Venugopal, said health tourism worldwide is a booming industry and with the ease of travel across continents, it has become more and more a regular feature in the health plans of people to seek advanced medical treatment.

Kerala is ideally suited to leverage its expertise in both these areas to get a sizeable portion of the booming global health tourism industry. With this objective, he said the Government had declared 2006-07 as the Kerala Health Tourism Year.

The State has gained international attention in health tourism and is becoming an ideal health tourism destination.

Addressing the inaugural session, Dr Y.P. Bhatia, Chairman of the accreditation committee of the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals (NABH), said the Quality Council of India had adopted the set of 100 standards, consisting of 505 measurable requirements, in January this year for accreditation of hospitals and treatment centres to assure patients of a minimum quality of services.

According to Dr Bhatia, accreditation to a hospital stimulates continuous improvement and it enables hospitals in demonstrating commitment to quality care. It raises community confidence in the services provided by the hospital and also provides opportunity to healthcare unit to benchmark with the best.

A committee of 45 experts drawn up by the Indian Health Care Federation (IHCF) and the CII has devised the standards. The IHCF-CII draft was submitted to the Quality Council of India in July last year and the council adopted them in January this year. The Central Government is expected to formally publish these standards shortly.

The standards are encapsulated under 10 chapters. While five of the chapters are patient-centric, the other five are hospital-centric, Dr Bhatia said.

Dr Philip Augustine, Chairman of Kerala Health Tourism and Managing Director of Lakeshore Hospital, said there has been an increasing flow of patients from West Asia and western countries to countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and Jordan for treatment.

Of late, India too was emerging as a healthcare destination for foreigners, especially in the areas of cardiac and cosmetic surgery, dentistry, ENT, orthopaedic and organ transplants besides health check-ups.

This flow of patients had been caused partly by the exorbitant cost of healthcare facilities in the western countries, all of which were not covered by insurance, and the long wait for certain surgeries, he added.

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