Abstract
Medical tourism is the travelling of people to a different place to receive treatment for a disease, an ailment, or a condition, or to undergo a surgical procedure. It is a form of international trade in services. Medical tourism allows some countries to export their products and services to other countries and improve their balance of payments. It also gives many advantages to the travelers, such as getting high quality of medical treatment that is not available in their home country or to get it at a low cost. As a part of its economic diversification strategy, the UAE has invested heavily in establishing world-class medical facilities, standard, with high treatment standards for citizens as well as for people from outside especially from the middle-east and Africa, who come to UAE on the medical tourist visas, which is a paradox. The study is of outward tourism is set to study in terms of numbers, ailments, procedure and destination lists and efficiency. The study found many interesting trends of medical tourism in the outward of the UAE, some of these trends are positive and are in need to be boosted by health authorities to build a better and profitable healthcare industry in the country. In sum, the study is a study of the dynamics of outward medical tourism with the help of a sample of 232 medical tourists from UAE to other countries. It is found that there is a rising trend of outward medical tourism which can be well taken care by raising the status of medical and treatment facilities in the UAE to the global level.
Highlights
The travelling of people from their country to other countries seeking medical treatment is called in literature as “medical tourism”, which is a rising form of tourism more so in the newly developed nations like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with rising national and per capita incomes
The UAE too, in its development journey of last five decades or so, has come to enjoy good medical reputation with world standard medical infrastructure and treatment facilities, which are well conducive to medical tourism, yet, the UAE government spent a large chunk of its total healthcare budget to send its Emirati people abroad for medical treatment
To identify the main factors influencing the decision making for selecting the destination for medical services, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was applied, which allowed for the grouping of the specified measures
Summary
The travelling of people from their country to other countries seeking medical treatment is called in literature as “medical tourism”, which is a rising form of tourism more so in the newly developed nations like the UAE with rising national and per capita incomes. Their medical tourism destinations are likely to be medically well endowed the USA, UK, and other medically established nations that command good medical reputation. The UAE aspires to be No 1 in every field, seeking to overcome the medical gap to give its citizens world-class facilities and treatment to retain its patients aspiring to go abroad and to inward tourist inflows from Asia and Africa, especially in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as a global medical hub, with the Collaboration of American Hospital in Dubai with Mayo Clinic, and the presence of Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi and many others to name in the country
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