Why sick expats are flying home
With staff shortages, Brexit and a winter rush on clinics and hospitals, it makes sense for some expatriates to fly back to SA for surgery and even for routine medical care and check-ups
As a winter flu epidemic slows Britain’s overburdened National Health Service (NHS) to a crawl, SA expats in the country are making special trips back home — not just for surgical procedures but even for routine dental and medical check-ups. In an October cover story last year, Jay Caboz of Forbes Africa noted that the medical tourism industry as a whole was estimated at £31.5bn-£50.5bn "and SA is sitting at the top table ... The country has the advantage of good hospitals, English-speaking doctors and breathtaking landscapes." Medical experts have been warning for some time of a crisis in the UK’s public health-care system, which was founded in 1948 to cope with post-war poverty. While emergency admissions in Britain have risen 14% since 2010, a winter rush on clinics and hospitals caused by the gastroenteritis norovirus, nicknamed the "vomiting bug", forced administrators to suspend 55,000 nonessential operations. Hospital corridors have been filling up, with patients on gurneys w...
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