Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
M.R. Dzulkipli & N.A. Mohamed-Yunus
Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Puncak Alam, Malaysia
I. Zakaria
Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Kelantan, Malaysia
ABSTRACT: Health tourism can be defined as the pursuit of other countries' patient to seek treatment
abroad. It was noted that the utmost reason why medical tourists seek medical attention abroad was due
to the economy and cost saving factors. In Malaysia, the notion of health tourism has started to emerge
in the turbulence recession time in the late 90s. A dawdling economic development had forced the govern-
ment to diverse its country income, hence resulting the born of health tourism activity in healthcare. This
study aims to define the relationship of STEP analysis to measure the development of health tourism in
Malaysia. This analysis is useful to measure the external environment that may affect healthcare organiza-
tion. Apart from that, it will be useful to look the healthcare organization's potential of health tourism
development from various factors as listed by STEP analysis. Few recommendations were put forward to
expedite the development of health tourism to the desired state.
Keywords
:
Economy, health tourism development, politic, social, technology
1 INTRODUCTION
Malaysia is one of the Southeast Asia countries
that are pursuing to promote health services to
foreigners. Malaysia through various government
efforts has put the medical expertise and services
into profitable business by launching campaign
and promotional activities to sell the services to
the potential consumer abroad (Lunt et al., 2013).
This step is taken as one of the method to vary
the national income with twofold activities such
as health tourism. Health tourism is believed to
be able to provide appropriate medical care to the
patient and in the same time allow the patient to
enjoy the vacation after they recover.
Among the contributing factors that lead to the
potential growth of health tourism are long wait-
ing list that is faced by the patient in developed
countries, high cost of medical services and lack-
ing of insurance coverage to cover the higher cost
of medical in certain developed countries (Garcia-
Altes, 2005). Previously, it was noted that most
of the patient who go overseas to obtain medical
services were due to better medical technology
and high skilled expertise at lower cost. Though
the price to get medical services overseas was con-
sidered high, in recent development, the trend has
changed whereby the opportunity to get the treat-
ment abroad is now can be bought by the middle
income countries (Leng, 2007). As a result, more
involvement can be expected from developing
countries that offer affordable medical cost to the
1.1
Background
Health tourism has started to boom in the health
care industry of Southeast Asia since the recession
in 1997. To maintain the survival of their business,
most private hospitals have opened its doors to cater
the need of the wealthy patients of the neighbor-
ing countries. As a result, most of private hospitals
were resorted to promote health care services to the
foreigners to compensate the “refusal” of the local
population to seek treatment in the countries pri-
vate hospitals (Lunt, Mannion & Exworthy, 2013).
Health tourism is defined as a vacation that
require the patient to travel abroad to obtain medi-
cal services offered or offered health tourism as
part of their health services (Alvarez, Chanda &
Smith, 2011; Heung, Kucukusta & Song, 2010).
According to Horowitz and Rosensweig (2007),
health tourism can be further expanded as a mean
to get appropriate and affordable medical services
in which the patient seeks in developing country
(which is relatively low in cost) compared to their
own countries. On the other hand, health tourism
activity can be redefined as exporting the medical
services to the other nations particularly among
developed countries. However, it must be noted
that the “exportation” will take place in the place
where the services is offered.
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