Jordan has become an attractive country for Yemeni patients seeking medical treatment. They are now the largest group of medical toursists in Jordan’s top hospitals.
Jordan has recently become an attractive country for Yemeni patients seeking medical treatment. It is taking business from countries that were popular with Yemeni patients including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India.
Yemeni patients are now the largest national group of medical tourists at the top ten private and public hospitals in Jordan. Yemeni patients enjoy preferential treatment, with a discount of 20% off medical bills, the same discount offered to Jordanians.
The Jordanian minister of health, Dr. Na’f Al-Faiz, claims that the Jordanian government makes medical tourism a top priority, and wants hospital organisations to help set specific mechanisms for the regulation of medical tourism under the ministry’s supervision and coordination.
Jordanian medical treatment costs are not high compared to the costs in other countries, such as Yemen, Sudan and Libya- but much more important is that none of those three countries has health services as good as the hospitals in Jordan.
The main reason for the influx from Yemen is the government is paying to send patients for treatment
One reason why Jordan struggles with patients from the USA or Europe is that Jordan lacks controls over medical malpractice. Where a business or insurer pays for treatment, this can be important. But most patients to Jordan are either self paying or paid for by governments, and are from countries where the very principle of malpractice or negligence does not exist in law.
Recent discussion on insurance for hospitals led to the conclusion that medical malpractice insurance is irrelevant, as local law does not recognize the concept of malpractice. Whether a Jordanian hospital could be successfully sued in an overseas court for malpractice will remain a theoretical question until it happens.
Much of Jordan’s medical tourism deals with people from countries who are in or next to a war zone.
Tourism is one of Jordan’s main money-earners and although the country is peaceful, it is having to admit that tourism is being affected by regional conflicts, particularly the violence in neighbouring Iraq and Syria, which is now spilling into Turkey.
Tourism in 2014 contributed 14% of the kingdom’s gross domestic product, the second highest earner after remittances from expatriates. But the flow of tourism revenue is becoming a trickle. For example, the number of people who visit Petra every year has nearly halved – from just under a million in 2010 to 600,000 last year. Ten hotels there have had to close. Official figures show that revenue from tourism was down 15% during the first four months of 2015 on last year, due to a fall in numbers.
The country’s tourism office has come up with an emergency plan aimed at raising Jordan’s international profile and targeting in particular the Gulf region, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and new markets including Turkey, China, Japan and South Korea, with the hope of seeing positive results from 2016.
Medical tourism does not currently picture in these new plans, and most of these countries offer Jordan few prospects in medical tourism. But tourism authorities admit that they are having a rethink on boosting services such as medical tourism.
Local hospital groups often claim that Jordan has become the prime medical destination in the Middle East and North Africa, with 250,000 foreign patients treated in 2014. These figures are dubious as they are the same ones that have been used for the last decade.
Even local tourism agents admit that much of the plans to boost tourism and medical tourism are more based on hope and hype than reality. While promoting the country’s safety to try to reassure foreign visitors, Jordanian involvement in the air campaign against Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq means it is no longer sheltered from extremism. Western governments regularly warn their citizens that Jordan is not immune from the violence that afflicts the region. The threat of terrorism remains high in Jordan, says the US State Department.
Jordan’s medical tourism is unique in that while the region’s problems can turn off some paying customers, the worse the situation on war, civil war and terrorism is locally-the more patients flee to Jordanian hospitals, including from Libya and Syria.
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