HEALTH TOURISM IN TURKEY AND SOME EFFECTS FOR ACCREDITED HOSPITALS

Abstract

One of the tourism types thought under the range of variation in tourism is health tourism. In order to have tourism in every season throughout the year, health tourism started to have a great importance nowadays. When you say health tourism, the first thing that comes to mind is thermal sources. In addition to this, some well-developed and well-equipped hospitals have been making big organizations to get patients to treat and earning money on dollar basis in medical tourism. The rise of medical tourism has happened in parallel with the privatization of health care, the growing need for expensive technology, uneven access to health resources and the accelerated globalization of both health care and tourism. In both activities related to health, tourism means have been used. Moreover after their treatments, their some motives like shopping, entertaining, sightseeing, come out and this creates a large amount of increase in tourism income because of their stay for longer periods Under these circumstances, it is essential to think these two topics together and to evaluate the existing possibilities in terms of quality and quantity and it is also a must to renovate environment and organization. This paper evaluates the conditions of the Turkish accredited hospitals and their marketing strategies as a case study in global competition. This study also aimed to diagnose the problems of related institutions in Turkey and in order to give some advice to them to solve their conflicts. In this way it will be easier to take advantage of both health tourism and get better benefits and also in the aspect of getting public health in a proper way.