The most popular medical services in Poland
According to the information from the Healthpoland website, most of the foreign patients come from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Belgium, which are countries, where operations are much more expensive than in Poland. They come here for dental treatment (including implantations, putting veneers on, or whitening teeth with a laser) and treatments from aesthetic medicine, they are also interested in ophthalmology, laryngology and orthopedics. Poland is also eagerly visited by people of Russia, who started to enjoy medical vacation in our health spas ans SPA Wellness resorts – especially in Pomorze. According to Dziennik Bałtycki, people living in Kaliningrad are getting more and more interested in treatments from rehabilitation, orthopedics and ophthamology. These divisions of medicine also attract Americans, similarly to plastic surgery and bariatrics. Meanwhile, people of Ukraine come to Poland for difficult operations of nephrological diseases.
Medical treatment in Poland – advantages for patients, clinics anmd hotels
The greatest advantages associated with the development of medical tourism is introducing modern methods of treatment to the offers of Polish clinics and equipping the cabinets with technologically advanced medical utensils. As a result, the quality of offered services is improving – the treatments are faster, quicker and safer, as well as less invasive, and the time of recuperation is much shorter. The moderniaztion of clinics is necessary in order to attract the attention of foreign patients, who, when given a large choice, will come to a resort, which will guarantee the highest level of medical services. This is especially true with the citizens of USA, who – according to Artur Gosk, president of Chamber of Commerce of Medical Tourism – expect Polish clinics to have american certificates.
The other division, which takes advantage of the increasing number of foreign medical tourists, is tourism itself. More and more often, foreigners combine medical treatment with a vacation, sightseeing and entertainment. Larger activity can be noticed in hotels and restaurants. Vacation resorts, such as health spas and SPA & Wellness resorts are also developing. The facilities do their best to make their guests’ stay more attractive by continual upgrading of the quality of their services. This fact is especially crucial for people of Russia, who, according to Oksana Poliszko from the Terra Incognita company from Smoleńsk, require comfortable condition of accommodation, interesting tours and a wide choice of SPA treatments. The intensive progress is also the case of the resorts’ staff itself. The doctors, as well as the hotel employees, fluently know foreign languages, thanks to which the barrier, which many foreigners are afraid of, disappears.
Medical tourism and promotion of Polish medical clinics abroad
According to the Chamber of Commerce of Medical Tourism, each year Poland is visited by an average of 300.000 foreigners interested in medical treatment, and that number might be increasing by 10-15% annually. The large potential of this division was noticed by the Ministry of Economy, which allocated 4 million PLN from the EU funds to the program of promoting medical tourism. This is the first governmental project to be co-financed by the European Union, with the aim of promoting the Polish medical market. Its fulfillment was spread over the years 2012-2015, and it will be promoted by the consortium, which will consists of: Europejski Centrum Przedsiębiorczości
(EuCP) AMEDS Centrum and Polska Agencja Informacji i Inwestycji Zagranicznych (PAIiIZ). The activity of the consortium will be focused on promoting the products, services and certain enterprises from the industry of medical tourism, as well as promoting the Polish market of medicine. The goal of the projectis to get patients from Germany and Great Britain, as well as citizens of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Russia and USA interested in Polish medical services.