Bangladesh spends $4b healthcare tourism yearly

Staff Reporter :

Increasingly a larger number of middle-income households have been seeking healthcare services from abroad despite many of this treatments being available locally, the demand for medical tourism keeps growing unabated, said Ashraf Ahmed president of Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
He made this remark at a seminar on “Reversing the Outbound Healthcare Tourism” organized by DCCI yesterday at its Auditorium.
We need to be better in terms of quality of medical services, provide better customer satisfaction and most importantly be more reliable both in measurable index and branding, he added.
The budget in the health sector is not sufficient, In FY2024-25 allocation in the health sector was 30125 crore taka which is 3.78 percent of the total budget. Where per-capita health expenditure in South Asia is $401 in PPP but in Bangladesh it is only $110 said Malik Talha Ismail Bari, Senior Vice President of DCCI.
Patients sometimes go abroad for healthcare services due to lacking facilities, trust, and comfort. To reverse the outbound patients, we need to do a proper plan and identify the bottlenecks said National Professor Dr. A K Azad Khan, Bangladesh Diabetic Samity.
We need to transform our healthcare into healthcare tourism. More and more quality Hospitals should be established in the rural area for wider coverage. Besides, in Bangladesh, there is a shortage of trustee hospitals. Customized service is needed to entertain all groups of patients, he added said Professor Dr. Rezaul Karim Kazal, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, BSMMU.
Bangladesh is a producer of medicines now and we also export to various countries, but in producing medical devices, we are still lagging said Dr. Abul Bashar Md. Jamal, Professor of Surgery, and Dhaka Medical College Hospital.