Medical tourism looks healthy in Malaysia, but in Singapore?
The Lion City’s reputation as a high-end destination for medical tourists is under threat from Malaysia, where quality of care is rising and costs are falling. But Singapore may have a trick up its surgical sleeves
When Indonesian retiree Gunawan Soegianto needed surgery for a recent ear infection he had no hesitation in heading off to his medical centre of choice – in Malaysia. Soegianto, 67, is no stranger to heading abroad for treatment – he has travelled to Mahkota Medical Centre in Malacca twice-yearly for the past five years to get full-body check-ups, taking his extended family with him when he goes.
“Sometimes there are five to six of us, sometimes 10,” says the former businessman from Surabaya, a port city on the Indonesian island of Java.
The service and quality of care is definitely better than in Indonesia, he says, and it is cheaper than in Singapore, which was once the go-to destination for Indonesian medical tourists; now it is losing patients to its neighbour across the causeway.
Singapore received somewhere between 370,000 and 550,000 foreign patients last year, according to Patients Beyond Borders. Malaysia received 940,000 while Thailand received between 1.3 million and 1.8 million. Thailand is a clear favourite among those seeking cosmetic operations but increasingly it is Malaysia and Singapore that are competing when it comes to the complex operations that bring in the most revenue.
The city state’s receipts from medical tourism peaked at S$1.1 billion (HK$6.3 billion) in 2012, according to the Singapore Tourism Board. They fell to S$832 million the following year before edging up in 2014 to S$994 million. The tourism board has stopped releasing the figure but research firm Frost & Sullivan expects it to be down to S$800 million this year.
That’s still more than Malaysia, where the industry is expanding rather than contracting, in terms of money made. In Malaysia, revenue from medical tourism was 777 million ringgit (HK$1.4 billion) in 2014, 900 million ringgit in 2015 and is projected by Frost & Sullivan to pass the 1 billion ringgit mark this year.