IDENTIFYING CHALLENGES AND BARRIERS CONFRONTING SRI LANKA IN MEDICAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT WITH SPECIAL REFERENCES TO COLOMBO AREA

Abstract

Medical tourism is one of the emerging segments in the global tourism arena. Medical tourism is primarily reflecting people travel to overseas countries to obtain healthcare services. Asia pacific region holds the largest share in the global medical tourism sector, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea are considered a few Asian market leaders who are promoting medical tourism aggressively in the global medical tourism market. Medical tourism is in Sri Lanka still at its introductory level and at the same time it can be identified high potential for the development of the medical tourism industry. Since Sri Lanka is focusing on developing medical tourism, this study helps to identify challenges and barriers confronting Sri Lanka in medical tourism development and further identifies the current scenario of medical tourism in the Sri Lankan context. A qualitative study was carried out as a case study covering leading private hospitals, destination management companies in Colombo handling medical tours, and responsible governmental authority in developing medical tourism under the Convenience sampling method as the sampling technique. The primary data was collected from seven executive-level managers representing mentioned organizations using semi-structured interviews. The thematic analysis method is used to analyze data. As per the findings, Sri Lanka implements their medical tourism operations on a preliminary basis and identified a variety of potentials to develop medical tourism mainly the high-quality international medical care for the lowest price. Further, the researcher has showed identified challenges and barriers confronting medical tourism development in this study. Apart from the prevailing economic crisis, the lack of government corporations to develop medical tourism and the lack of supplier collaboration among the medical tourism suppliers can be identified as the major barriers to developing medical tourism in Sri Lanka. Further inadequate promotion efforts and high competition has identified as challenges that restrain the development of Sri Lankan medical tourism industry. This study encourages the government to develop the medical tourism segment in the future. Moreover, it would provide guidelines in policymaking and updating rules and standards, cooperating with relevant institutions to develop medical tourism in Sri Lanka