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THE Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan asked the Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) to find investors to build an international class hospital to support the government’s plan to develop medical tourism in Indonesia.
According to Luhut, there needs to be support from the government through massive promotions and other supporting facilities, such as building international hospitals to bringing in specialist doctors from abroad so that the quality and tariffs of Indonesian medical services can be comparable to the countries that did this first.
“I want an international standard hospital like John Hopkins in the United States, with a branch in Indonesia. Therefore, I ask BKPM to be able to find potential investors to build international class hospitals in Jakarta, Bali and Medan,” he said in an upload on his personal Instagram account in Jakarta.
Luhut said the government will also consider permits for foreign doctors, but it must be according to needs. Foreign doctors will not just come, but collaborate with local doctors and medical personnel so that later the hospital will become a “teaching hospital” and they must always be assisted by specialist doctors from Indonesia.
“I also propose to the relevant ministries/institutions to review the regulations that allow foreign doctors to work in Indonesia by considering the composition and duration of work permits, as well as the added value,” he said.
He hopes that the momentum of the pandemic crisis can really be used to improve infrastructure, supporting facilities, and health service regulations in Indonesia so that they can be even better by creating good and integrated planning for the domestic medical tourism industry.
Luhut said the plan to develop medical tourism was carried out because based on PwC’s analysis in 2015, Indonesia was the country of origin for medical tourists with a total of 600,000 people, the world’s largest beating the United States with 500,000 medical tourists in the same year.
Indonesian citizens choose medical treatment abroad on the grounds that they do not have domestic medical services to cure specific diseases.
Another consideration, namely the fact that the average medical tourist expenditure is US$3,000 to US$10,000 per person. On the other hand, the number of medical tourism globally has also increased from year to year. There is also an experience from an ophthalmologist about patients who used to go to Singapore now going to Indonesia because they are not comfortable with quarantine.
“Looking at the facts above, I think the development of medical tourism in Indonesia is very realistic, and I think we need to build a distrust about the experience of treatment abroad in order to foster the trust of Indonesian medical tourists, and the most important thing for me is through the tourism industry. In this medical field, we are able to diversify the economy, attract foreign investment, provide employment opportunities, develop the health care industry in Indonesia, and hold back our health services and foreign exchange from flowing to more prosperous countries,” Luhut concluded. [antaranews/photo special]
