A study on scope of medical tourism in Gujarat state: Service providers’ perspective

During the last decade, the State of Gujarat has witnessed enormous growth of high quality health care delivery facilities in both types of hospitals, public and private. Gujarat's Healthcare sector has made impressive strides in recent times and is surging ahead with new facilities and technology. To ensure that health care industry in the State of Gujarat reap the benefits of this promising development, it is imperative that the stakeholders evolves a coordinated strategy, which could promote the all round growth of all systems of medicine to match the requirements and expectation of international medical tourists in the State.

This study aims to identify the key drivers for the enormous growth of medical tourism industry, and to check their relevance for the state of Gujarat. This paper tries to focus the service providers’ perspective for the major areas need to be focused to tap the opportunities in this sector.

In the first phase, the exploratory research design has been followed to understand and determine the relevant factors of medical tourism through critical review of literature. In second phase of the study, we tried to check the relevance of these factors for the state of Gujarat. For that detailed responses from doctors were collected with the help of structured questionnaire, selected as respondents using judgment method of non probability sampling method, and analyzed to understand the service providers’ perspective. Findings of the study can be very useful to the policymakers and industry participants to cater the need of medical tourists.