Medical Tour: Newly Rising Korean Wave - written by 10414 Lee Ji In
K-pop has led a lot of tourists to Korea. There were 13.34 million foreign visitors last year. But other than K-pop, there is a newly emerging and popular Korean wave, which is medical travel.
Recently, a number of travelers visit Korea, because it has cutting- edge medical devices, professional doctors and broad range of treatments. 364,000 people visited Korea for medical purpose in 2016. Most of them are from China, Japan, America and Russia. Among these, the number of Russian travelers are increasing very rapidly.
Why could this happen? How could this happen?
According to KOTRA (Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency), Korea ranked the third place that Russians would like to visit for medical purpose. For the last 10 years, the number of the tourists surged for 10 times more than any other year. Since 2009 Korea’s medical tour industry started developing after Korea modified the laws about foreign patients.
With the popularity of K-pop and geological proximity, Russia has been one of the major countries for Korea’s medical travel.
In 2016, Korea participated in the World Health Welfare in Moscow. Also, Seoul and ten hospitals held promotion event in Khabarovsk in Russia on May 17th, 2018. 6,000 people who joined the Feel Korea Festival held on June 8th in Moscow proved Korea’s popularity there.
The average treatment fee for one patient is 18,430,000 won, which is higher than the other foreign countries (13,120,000 won). The days of hospital procedure for Russians are 13.1 days, which is also higher than other foreign countries which were 9.2 days. The total fee of Russian patients was about 7.92 billion won which was the third of foreign patients and the income was the second place.
In the past, the services with special medical tour agents were common. But nowadays, patients can contract the hospital directly and get customized services. This means that the interchange between Korea and Russia is becoming freer and more autonomous. Following the trend, many hospitals in Korea is setting MOU with the Russian hospitals.
Besides, some of the hospitals set the Korean, English and Russian as their official languages on their websites.
The Korean medical travel industry can entail many other positive effects as well as in medical field and develop the economy entirely.
Accordingly, Korea should reinforce the management so that the unfair treatments like inflated fee or discriminations will not happen. Moreover, Korea should devise many travel services, events and facilities for foreigners to introduce the culture to the world and enhance other travel industries.
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