"the top reason for going abroad for surgery was to avoid NHS waiting lists at home"

Sound too good to be true? Well, unfortunately, it is not quite as simple as that title sounds, but going abroad for medical treatment is a growing business. According to The Medical Tourism Report: UK 2009, the top reason for going abroad for surgery was to avoid NHS waiting lists at home. Potential ‘treatment travellers’ are primarily motivated by speed of treatment and avoiding waiting lists.

So what treatment are people having? The report has been reviewed in detail by the International Medical Travel Journal, (IMTJ) and it shows the most popular treatment to be dentistry (28%) while 10% opted for cosmetic operations like liposuction or breast surgery, 7% had eye surgery and 6% had blood and dialysis treatment. Interestingly, men were almost twice as likely to have had surgery abroad. Older people were far more likely to go abroad for treatment, with 16% of those aged over 65 years seeking treatment abroad, compared with 7% of those aged 18 to 24 and 8% of those aged 25 to 35. If you are interested in the full detail of the report, go here.

And where are people going for treatment? According to the IMTJ’s review: “Thailand (7%), Malaysia (8%) and Singapore (7%) are the most visited destinations, with Spain (7%) and Italy (5%) revealed as Europe’s medical tourism destinations of choice for UK medical tourists.”

This brings me onto a particularly interesting statistic from the IMTJ review of The Medical Tourism Report – more than one in four (27%) wanted to combine treatment with a holiday and 9% wanted to go abroad to get away from family or work while they recuperated. All of the locations listed above are popular holiday destinations in their own right, whether for activity holidays, beach breaks or city tours.

This got me thinking about the preparation for such a unique holiday.  Presumably, a lot of those mundane little tasks will still need to take place – the currency exchange, traveller’s cheques, packing lists, toiletries purchasing, and (the always important!) checking the expiry date of the passport.

But at the same time, some things will be very different – for example, although travel insurance is normally one of the things that will be ticked off the pre-holiday checklist – travelling abroad for treatment, will not be covered under a standard policy, and will need a specialised travel insurance policy. In the same way, rather than speaking to your local travel agent, specialised medical tourism facilitators will probably be used to plan your trip. More useful information can be found here www.treatmentabroad.com.

I would be really interested to hear other people’s experiences on preparing for this kind of   holiday?…