Dubai: Dubai health-care providers are continuing to roll-out comprehensive packages for medical tourists, said a top health official. The top six fields attracting tourists are orthopaedics, aesthetics, dentistry, preventive health and wellness, and fertility treatments. The highest number of tourists completely come from Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries as well as Russia and Commonwealth Independent States (CIS), Africa and the UK.
At the moment the health authorities are working in tandem with the immigration to upgrade several packages to include hotel and wellness options while many other private sector providers are looking to add more benefits to make the packages attractive to medical tourists.
Dr Layla Al Marzouqi, Acting-Director of Dubai Health Authority’s (DHA), Health Regulation Department and Director of Dubai Medical Tourism Project, said: “Several of the existing players that offer medical tourism packages are now looking at ways to further enhance or upgrade their packages by offering a host of features such as travel, accommodation, wellness and spa facilities, chauffeur service, translators and all other services that will help make the stay of patients and their family members more enjoyable and comfortable.”
Linda Abdulla, Head of the Medical Tourism office at the DHA, said: “Medical tourism is a natural extension in Dubai because of the high-quality of care that both private and public players offer. The private players are our partners in this initiative and the DHA has a medical tourism club that consists of 30 members from the private health-care sector in Dubai that meet on a regular basis to discuss several important topics such as medical tourism packages, insurance for medical tourists, rating of medical tourism facilities, transparency and pricing, medical complaints procedure etc.”
