Abstract
Today, medical tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry around the world. Medical tourism can contribute to the sustainable development and economic dynamism of countries. Therefore, in this study, we prioritize the world’s leading countries in medical tourism for Iranians. First, five main criteria and 20 sub-criteria were selected, which are the reasons for choosing a country as a medical tourism destination. In this paper a combined fuzzy SWARA-PROMETHEE approach was used to prioritize tourism destinations. The acronym PROMETHEE stands for Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation method and represents an useful MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis) tool. On the other hand, SWARA acronym means Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis. The criteria were weighted using the fuzzy SWARA approach. In the following, using the PROMETHEE approach, we prioritized eight countries as tourism destinations, then we identified criteria related to sustainability of medical tourism destinations and prioritized medical tourism destinations using these criteria as the contributions of this paper. The weights obtained for criteria “Abilities of skilled staff,” “Applied medical equipment,” “Marketing capability,” “Type of service provided,” and “Application of information and communications technology” were 0.176, 0.232, 0.108, 0.395, and 0.089, respectively. The results show that medical tourism destination priorities for Iranians are India (Phi = 0.1396), Malaysia (Phi = 0.1128), Panama (Phi = 0.0976), Mexico (Phi = 0.0790), Singapore (Phi = 0.0096), Taiwan (Phi = −0.0442), Brazil (Phi = −0.1747), and Costa Rica (Phi = −0.2196), respectively. Negative Phi values indicate below average performance of those countries and positive Phi values indicate above average performance of those criteria. The results indicate that countries with negative Phi values should be strengthened relative to the improvement of some criteria.
Highlights
Tourism as well as medical tourism can be sustainable if developed and managed, considering visitors/medical tourists and local communities/health care centers [3]. This can be achieved through community engagement, congestion management, reduction of seasonality, careful planning that respects the limits of capacity and the specificities of each destination, and product diversification [4,5]
The opinions of five experts with more than 20 years of experience in the field of medical tourism were used. These experts were among the most experienced surgeons in the country who have been working in the field of medical tourism in various countries for many years
As can be seen by the increase in the weight of this criterion up to 50% and keeping the weights of the other criteria constant, Malaysia was selected as the top medical tourism destination, followed by Mexico in second rank
Summary
Tourism as well as medical tourism can be sustainable if developed and managed, considering visitors/medical tourists and local communities/health care centers [3]. This can be achieved through community engagement, congestion management, reduction of seasonality, careful planning that respects the limits of capacity and the specificities of each destination, and product diversification [4,5]. Zarei et al [8] defined medical tourism as an individual’s travel for treatment (whether through medical intervention or the use of natural resources), rest, and maintaining physical health. This travel can be voluntarily or on the advice of a doctor [9]
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