Health Tourism and Patient Satisfaction in Turkey: the Ankara Example

Abstract

During the last ten years health tourism and medical tourism started to grow very fast all over the world. Indıa has taken first place with low prices in the medical tourism market. Other destination countries following India are Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the USA. Turkey makes progress each year and increase the number of patients every year to take part in this ranking. While number of patients is 156,176 in 2011 this number increased to 262,999 in 2012. Most of the patients admitted fromGermany,Libya andRussia. The emerging developments and demand for health tourism both increase competition, the quality of serving institutions and the alternatives for the patients. In this competitive environment organizations aimed to attract foreign patients and began to consider the patients’/clients’ wishes, expectations, satisfaction, and complaints. Since health sector provides service, satisfaction of the customers/ patients is very important in order sustain their relation with the institution. In this study, the aim is to identify the marketing strategies forTurkey in order to have high market share in health tourism. Since customer satisfaction has an importance in word of mouth communication and customer loyalty the importance of satisfaction tried to explored out also in this study. As a research methodology survey was conducted. Total 180 participants attended to the survey. The participants of the survey are the patients who admitted public hospitals and got inpatient treatment inAnkara city where is ranked among top three on medical tourism. It explored that the patients’ (who prefer the Turkey at medical tourism) age, sex, marital status, education, hospital expenses coverage status, profession, nationality, initial state and advertising are the factors that affect their level of satisfaction.