GENERAL OVERVIEW OF HEALTH TOURISM IN TURKEY AND THE WORLD

Abstract

Health tourism is someone to prefer another country than the country the person lives in for the purpose of recuperation, improving wellness and benefiting from rehabilitation services. In recent years, health tourism, which is a trending topic in worlds agenda, has become a popular field in our country attended by the Ministry of Health. Number of international patients who receives health care services in Turkey at the year of 2008 was 74.093, this number raised to 392.950 in the year of 2015. 5.3 times of growth is seen in 7 years. The first 3 preferred cities are designated as Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya. This project aims to investigate the definition of health tourism, its scope and its global state as well as Turkey’s latest enhancements and goals in this domain and examination of Turkey’s current position based on latest’s available data. Turkey’s state in health tourism has been evaluated, by the obtained datas, strength and weaknesses in the sector, opportunities and threats they face examined with SWOT analysis. Most obvious advantage of Turkey is having an improved technology and qualified human power but the biggest handicap is that these staffs do not speak a foreign language. Areas that could be improved has been pointed out too. In addition, it is aimed to raise awareness about health tourism in our country with foreign participation from many countries in this congress