Hospitals in Ghana, private and public, want Nigerians to
look their way first when considering healthcare plans abroad as a way to keep
the huge capital flight on health tourism within the sub-region and build
scale.
Those from Turkey are craving for Nigerians to come and
experience all types of surgeries and operations manned by qualified healthcare
personnel, the latest technological equipment, and medical supplies within
Ankara, the capital city.
This is at a time when Nigeria is struggling to reverse
outbound medical tourism and encourage high-end consumers to trust the local
health system
The University of Ghana Medical Centre Limited, The Bank
Hospital, Lucca Health, an America-based healthcare provider, and Bethel Dental
Clinic, among other top hospitals in Ghana, led key sessions at the second
medical tourism expo held along with the 19th Akwaaba African Travel Market
event in Lagos on Tuesday.
Also, a collection of hospitals led by the Ankara Chamber of
Commerce, including Medipol Global International Health Services and the VM
Medical Park, Ankara Hospital showcased.
Koby Appiah-Sakyi, chief executive of The Bank Hospital,
Accra, said the Nigerian market was important because of the huge population
estimated at 214 million, more than half of the size of the West African
sub-region.
He said most hospitals in Ghana attract organic traffic flow
of patients from Nigeria as well as Benin, Ivory Coast, and others.
As a result, the African Medical Tourism Council was
established early this year to ease the accessibility of tourists who often
grumble about journeying to their destinations, Appiah-Sakyi said.
“It’s an important market and a lot of money goes out of
Nigeria to be spent in other parts of the world. What we are saying is that,
yes we must go somewhere but within our local sub-region, we must also develop
businesses,” he said.
“The reason we need to do this is to expand the scale within
the sub-region. If you come and you are operated, the scale stays within the
sub-region and it helps us in training our medical students. In 2000, Ghana
built the first cardiothoracic centre in the sub-region, which has trained over
100 surgeons, a lot of them Nigerians.”
Appiah-Sakyi returned to Ghana to establish a practice after
working at established institutions in the United Kingdom for 18 years and in
Qatar for seven years.
He said Ghana’s medical facilities have become modern over
the past 15 years, with many returning from abroad to set up facilities that
practice at a very high standard.
Medical tourism in Ghana is mainly driven by procedures in
cosmetics, dentistry, interventional cardiology, IVF, breast surgery, and
gynaecology.
In Turkey, it is driven by hair transplantation, dental
procedures, plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery and infertility treatment and
cost-effective rates, according to the Medical Tourism Association.
Turkey, for instance, is a popular destination for plastic
surgery, such as breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and liposuction. The prices
for plastic surgery in Turkey are much lower than in other countries, and the
quality of care is still very high.
Tamer Hotomaroglu, general secretary of the International
Health Tourism Association, said the safety of medical tourists was prime among
a host of services offered in Turkey.
He said Turkey was one of the safest places to undergo
medical procedures, adding that the current president of the World Organ
Transplant Association comes from Turkey.
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