IF THIS country becomes a centre for health tourism, the quality of general healthcare will improve, TT Coalition of Services Industries (TTCSI) CEO Nirad Tewarie says.
“The impact on the country will be great as we will be able to attract more and more tourists,” he said yesterday at the third annual Health and Wellness Expo at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain. The three-day expo is an initiative of Eidetic Publishing, which publishes the magazine U The Caribbean Health Digest.
Tewarie said as more and more people come to this country for increasingly higher value medical services there will be a concurrent increase in the quality level in the public health system. He said there will be complimentary services where the Health Ministry can purchase such services from the private sector that are lacking in the public sector.
“This will also create opportunities for our talented local medical professionals to feel comfortable that they can practice what they were trained to practice and they can expand their scope of practice right here in Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.
Tewarie continued: “And the impact of that on the health system overall, if managed properly and regulated to some extent and facilitated to a greater extent, will be tremendous. And therefore from top to bottom across the country we should, over time, see an increase in the quality of service,” he said.
Tourism Minister Stephen Cadiz, in his remarks, said in the next couple of years this country will become a centre for medical tourism. He reported that both he and Health Minister Dr Fuad Khan have had “numerous conversations” about medical tourism.
He noted they want to pursue it not only in the area of elective surgeries but also in the area of wellness. “I think we are ideally placed and suited for that,” he said. Cadiz pointed out that this country has always had medical tourism, though it may not have been recognised, and people from the region have come here for various types of treatment.
He noted, however, that “we never really went after”the sector. He said Costa Rica, for example, has a very large medical tourism sector and India as well.
Tewarie reported that the TTCSI through the Commonwealth Secretariat hired a team of experts to determine which of the local service sectors had the greatest short term growth potential to develop exports and they found that medical and education services had the highest among the sectors. He reported that the experts did an analysis of the number of beds and they found there is spare capacity in this country.
source: http://www.newsday.co.tt / Trinidad & Tobago Newsday / Home> Business / by Julien Neaves / Tuesday – May 28th, 2013
