Medical Tourism in Iran: attitude and challenges

Introduction: Medical Tourism is one of the most important branches of Tourism with many socioeconomic benefits. Medical Tourism refers to traveling to other countries to obtain medical services with lower costs comparing to their own countries. As health tourism is a new subject in Iran, we decided to study the attitude and knowledge of Qom Medical University staff about Health Tourism. Methods: This descriptive study was done on 250 Medical staff of Beheshti Hospital of Qom Medical University by completing questionnaires, which were divided into 3 parts (demographic information, knowledge and attitude of participants). All of the information was analyzed by SPSS software. Results: Only 12.8% of participants have studied articles about HealthTourism. The majority (59.2%) believed that Health Tourism development in Iran hasn’t any bad social consequence and 47%believed that Health Tourism development in Iran can improve the knowledge of Iranian medical doctors. The majority (56.6%) of participants agreed to the incoming of Health Tourists to Iran and the majority of them (83.6%) believed that development of Health Tourism can improve the treatment of Iranian patients. Conclusion: The knowledge of participants is very low and so much more educational efforts should be done by the responsible ministries but it seems medical staff’s attitude about health Tourism is very good and they can contribute effectively in this field.