Local English dailies reported on an observation of our Finance Minister Tuesday who wondered how Bangladesh would be able to attract medical tourists unless our private hospitals reduce their treatment costs. He also pointed out that most private hospitals ignore the mandatory requirement of providing free treatment to poor patients blaming them for flouting the Private Medical College Establishment and Management Policy-2011; which requires them to set aside 10 percent of the total beds for free treatment of the poor. Under the ongoing policy, 53 private medical hospitals avail of the duty free import of medical equipment but among them only Square Hospital is providing free treatment to some poor patients. Reports also added that Nepalese and Bhutanese patients want to visit Bangladesh to seek treatment but feel discouraged by the high costs of treatment charged by private hospitals. The government is planning to celebrate 2016 as the year of medical tourism and as part of it the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism has demanded Tk 200 crore to implement the three-year tourism boosting plan beginning 2016, but details plan is yet to be developed how the health sector could be turned into a foreign exchange earner by improving the service quality and reducing the treatment cost.
There is a growing question as to why private hospitals do not comply with their pledge, which they have made while getting the license to set up the hospitals. Two reasons are at work behind the compulsion. Firstly, wealthy people set up medical hospitals and they owe to the poor certain services as part of their corporate social responsibility. Moreover, they earn huge profit and the poor have a reasonable claim to benefit from it. The fact is that the poor have not enough money but they have the need to have the access to treatment particularly when the government hospitals are increasingly withdrawing facilities, making the poor along with others to become dependent on private health facilities. We want to note that when Square Hospital can fulfil its pledge, why others are failing using poor income to meet other expenditure.
We see that health care institutions in Bangladesh have reasonably grown up and particularly in case of treating diabetic patients, BIRDEM is already a leading hospital in the region. Bangladesh can reasonably offer low cost treatment to attract patients from neighbouring countries but to fulfil this target; government-private partnership is essential to find out the areas where targeted plan may be implemented to attract patients. In fact affordability of free treatment to poor patient depends both on better earnings as well as on sympathetic outlook to the poor. We believe private hospitals may be able to achieve both the targets if they can create cost effective treatment facilities.
