Dubai: With over 150,000 medical tourists visiting Dubai in 2014, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) rolled out four medical tourism packages during the Arab Health event. The packages are cost-effective and lower than those offered at private hospitals.
Dr Manal Al Taryam, CEO of DHA’s Primary Health Care centre (PHC), said:“ The health packages include special combination of a battery of tests for men, women, adolescents and senior citizens. These are available at some of DHA’s primary health-care centres(PHCs) such as the Al Barsha PHC. Packages for men and women comprise specialist consultation, lab tests and other diagnostic tests. For instance, the women’s health package includes consultation with a gynaecologist, several investigations including but not limited to blood tests, pap smear, breast cancer screening and a mammogram.
“The senior citizen package consists of several tests including lipid profile, liver profile and several other tests. The package also provides them with several vaccines such as for hepatitis and influenza.”
Dr Manal said both the men’s and women’s health packages are priced at Dh1,800, the adolescent health package is Dh1,300 and the senior citizen package costs Dh2,100.
Manal added that preventive screening is of utmost importance as it is essential for early detection and prevention of diseases and therefore both residents and visitors will see the benefit of these packages which are being offered at such attractive rates.
To make it even more easy, a tourist or resident can download the Sehaty app, register, make appointments and also receive reports on the app. “The goal of these packages it to allow a tourist who is having fun to also be able to complete his medical screening in no time which can be timely and preventive in many serious illnesses like cancer,” added Dr Manal.
In addition to the screening packages, DHA will offer fertility and LASIK eye surgery packages — two areas where the DHA hospitals have had considerable success.
The Dubai Fertility and Gynaecology Centre (DGFC), for instance, opened in 1991 and attends to 2,700 cases each year. With 5,000 live births to its credit it has a success rate of 60 per cent where the success rate of fertility clinics stands at 35 per cent worldwide,” said Dr Muna Al Tahlak, CEO of Latifa Hospital, said. She added that the fertility package would offer several free visits and free ultrasounds for the patient.
The DHA-run Dubai Hospital will also offer LASIK eye surgery packages that are priced at Dh6,500 and include all pre-operative assessments and tests, said Dr Abdullah Naqi, consultant ophthalmologist and acting head of the ophthalmology department at Dubai Hospital, which performed 5,000 LASIK surgeries last year.
Commenting on the importance DHA gives to excellence in health standards, Al Maidour said: “DHA offers high-quality health services across all spectrums of health care and we are the centre of excellence for many health specialities. Therefore, we decided to offer medical tourism packages for these specialities. We intend to extend our medical tourism packages and include more services in the future. Our packages are attractively priced and can be availed of by both residents, who are part of the domestic medical tourism initiative, as well as visitors who are keen to visit Dubai for medical tourism.”
