Medical Travel to Reverse ‘Brain Drain’

The “Brain Drain” Problem in the Philippines

According to Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, the medical travel industry may just be the right solution to fight the problem of brain drain in the Philippines.  The country has been facing an exodus of doctors and health professionals to foreign countries over the last several decades.  Bunye reported that recently Carlito Puno, the Chairman of the Commission on Higher Education, informed the Cabinet, that for every two doctors who graduate from a medical school, three leave for foreign shores, resulting in a net loss of one doctor every year.

Promoting Medical Packages in the Philippines

The Philippines is all geared up to cash in on the medical travel phenomenon, which is now a booming multibillion-dollar global industry. The medical travel business has already started making waves in the country’s health care sector. According to Bunye, producing more doctors and health professionals would be a simple solution to the brain drain problem. But thinking of long term benefits, a more effective solution to the brain drain problem would be to promote the medical travel industry and offer competent but cheap medical packages to patients from abroad. Well-organized medical packages in the Philippines will cultivate favorable conditions for doctors and other health professionals to stay in the Philippines.   

Attractive Medical Packages

Bunye, offering his own assessment of why medical packages in the Philippines are so alluring to foreign patients, spoke of the difference between the costs of Lasik eye surgery performed in the Philippines and abroad. He also pointed out that Blepharoplasty (a procedure to widen eye contours), a popular medical procedure among Japanese and Koreans, costs $7,000 less in the Philippines than in Japan and Korea. He also asserted that there are private medical institutions in the Philippines that offer professional medical packages. These facilities have state-of-the-art infrastructure and are staffed by world class professionals who are experienced enough to perform complicated heart surgeries, eye operations, knee replacements, orthodontic procedures, and Lasik and cosmetic surgery. According to Health Secretary Francisco Duque, the medical tourism industry earned around $200 million in the first year of its promotion in the country, and prospects for the future appear very bright.

Source: Sol Jose Vanzi, “Medical Tourism to Reverse ‘brain drain’,” The Philippine Star, November 13, 2006