Business
Jamaica: Health tourism sector to improve and expand
Jamaica is planning to expand its health tourism offerings, according to Industry Minister Anthony Hylton.
Improving the niche tourism market could help improve health care in Jamaica, create jobs, and attract revenue to the country.
“The poor will actually benefit from what would be centers of excellence created here in Jamaica to do things and to provide services, some of which are not now locally available,” he said. “We will bring those services here and they will be accessible to the wider public.”
(More: The Bahamas promoting medical tourism: $5 million stem cell clinic approved)
Key to expanding the sector is a a partnership between the public and private sectors in Jamaica, he said.
Any expansion of the sector in Jamaica should be modeled on the successful drives undertaken in countries like Singapore and India, according to Dr Neville Graham, medical director of EMedical Global Jamaica Limited.
“It has been proven in Singapore that with the advent of health tourism, they are now eighth in the world in terms of providing health care for their own population,” he said. “In India, 5 percent of the patients that health tourism facilities treat are local people.”
In an interview with journalists earlier this year, Tourism Minister Dr Wykeham McNeill said health tourism was at the forefront of the country’s tourism priorities.
“We feel that Jamaica is ideally suited and ideally placed, based on its location, to really get into health tourism in a big way,” he told journalists at the time.
Source: The Caribbean Journal