A cross-border trade in healthcare services : Bangladesh to India

Medical tourism, where patients travel overseas or across border for complex invasive medical treatment, has grown rapidly in the past decade, especially for heart, cancer, liver transplant, hip-replacement, reproductive and cosmetic surgery. The booming global medical tourism market provides an opportunity for India, to seek to attract medical tourists from South Asia, Arab and other Middle Eastern Islamic countries due to the cultural advantage and English language along with low cost, no waiting period and availability of medical treatment. A questionnaire was tested and administered to n=1282 medical patients in Bangladesh who had travelled to India for medical treatment between 1-3 or more times. The results concluded that the main reason for Bangladeshis to travel to India for medical treatment was: good quality and experienced doctors and physicians, quality of nursing care (pre and post surgery), low cost of surgery, non-availability of treatment in Bangladesh and modern/state of the art medical treatment and medical facilities in India, which concurs with the literature. Next stage of the future research will extend to testing hypothesis, looking at cross–border medical tourism from other neighboring countries with India, and India playing a leadership role to promote peace, trust and understanding through cross-border bilateral trade in healthcare service provision to South Asian countries via medical tourism.