Dubai: The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) will soon introduce ranking for hospitals and services, quite like the five star rankings in hotels, to create international standards in medical tourism.
Announcing this at the Arab Health Congress, Dr Layla Al Marzouqi, Director of DHA’s Medical Tourism initiative and Acting Director of the Medical Regulation department, told Gulf News: “We will rank health-care facilities and have already started the initiative. These rankings would be benchmarked against international standards.”
Among some of the criteria for rankings would be the performance, qualification and experience of doctors, the rate of successful surgeries, rate of violations, the capacity and quality of equipment, the ambience of the place, the availability of translation services, the outcome of audits and other such indicators. Based on these the hospital’s services or the hospital will be ranked and the results will be available on the Medical Tourism website. Any patient applying for a treatment will be able to independently see this evaluation and choose the service or the place accordingly.
Eisa Al Maidour, DHA Director-General, added that the prices of all services would be competitive and comparable to worldwide standards once the ranking is in place.
Dr Layla also announced the introduction of the medical tourism club which currently comprises 30 members — CEOs and managing partners of private health-care facilities who are major stakeholders in the medical tourism initiative. “The members will meet every month and will discuss various aspects such as insurance, transparency and pricing, medical complaints procedure, etc.”
She added that there is huge potential in the medical sector in Dubai and that there are 10 hospitals in Dubai that are presently under construction, which will add to the number of hospital beds in Dubai. “Some of the hospitals are specialised hospitals, which means the doctors will be specialised or even super-specialised. The growth in the medical sector is phenomenal. Over the years, health-care groups that had clinics are moving towards building hospitals, while those that have hospitals and now moving towards building super-speciality hospitals. Some of the under-construction hospitals are specialised hospitals for cancer, paediatrics etc. All this will further strengthen the quality of health care provided in Dubai which, in turn, will positively impact the medical tourism initiative.”
