MEDICAL tourism company, MedTours Africa have taken it upon themselves to facilitate smooth travel, hospital and specialist bookings for locals seeking treatment in India and South Africa in a bid to shield locals from falling into hands of fraudsters and con doctors.
By Michael Gwarisa
Services like dialysis, renal surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, orthopaedics and other complicated surgeries are hard and expensive to access locally but in countries like India, such services could be sourced at reasonable rates even after factoring in the flight fares and other costs.
Speaking to HealthTimes on the side-lines of the 2018, Zim-Afro Medical and Health Expo, MedTours marketing person, Alyness Mwanza said they have facilitated travel and treatment trips for more than 300 people since inception in Zimbabwe and the numbers are growing.
“As MedTours Africa, we are a medical tourism company, we facilitate and assist especially those who want to get treatment outside Zimbabwe especially in India and South Africa. Our main objective is to lessen the burden on care-givers by giving them the much-needed assistance of taking care of all travel and medical treatment logistics for their loved ones.
“Per month, we assist at least 10 people to go India and since 2015 you can do the maths. The medical conditions we deal with are those procedures which cannot or are not done in Zimbabwe. Some of them even include conditions like cancer depending on the condition,” said Alyness.
The company facilitates Visa applications, air flight bookings and secures reputable health organisation and specialists in foreign countries to ensure locals do not go through hassles upon arrival in a foreign land.
“We have partnered with different kinds of hospitals and specialists abroad who deal with different kinds of conditions.
“Most of the people that we have assisted, some have even done testimonials that we have put our website. While they are focusing on getting treated, we will be doing the running around and even engaging their personal doctors. We also do post treatment check-ups on the patients when they return to ensure the healing process is a complete package.”
She added that treatment in India is not as expensive as was the assumption in most circles.
In 2015, MedTours partnered with internationally acclaimed Satguru Partap Singh Apollo (SPS Apollo) Hospital in Punjab, India. The state-of-the-art 350-bed hospital has the most eminent panel of medical professionals, many of them leaders in their fields.
MedTours Africa provides one-stop-shop medical travel services and logistics for medical tourists. On the local market, medical tourism, which is a direct result of the globalisation of healthcare, is a fledgling industry.
