MEDICAL TOURISM: AN ASSESSMENT ON TURKEY

As a result of rapid globalization in healthcare services, humankind was introduced with the new form of medical tourism, and the direction of new medical tourism is completely different than the traditional one. In the old form of medical tourism, people travel to the developed countries to get advanced treatment that is not possible in their less developed countries; whereas, this condition reversed with the emergence of new form (Carrera and Bridges, 2006). In the new conjuncture, people started to travel abroad, especially to the developing countries like India, Thailand and Taiwan (Crooks et al., 2011). Many countries started to investigate the ways to benefit from the opportunities provided by the medical tourism as both exporter and importer of healthcare services. For example, USA seeks the way to reduce healthcare costs through medical tourism (US Senate, 2006; Marlowe and Sullivan, 2007). Turkey has also great potential to attract the interest of people as an important medical tourism destination. With its geographical advantage, Turkey accelerated its efforts to take place among the leaders in medical tourism. In this article, general conditions of medical tourism in the world, Turkey’s efforts to improve medical tourism and Turkey’s potential, advantages and disadvantages in medical tourism are discussed.