The original article can be found in: The Gleaner By Anastasia Cunningham
Health tourism is one of the most important yet overlooked areas that Jamaica needs to place greater focus on, says Phillip Mascoll, executive member of the Jamaican Diaspora Canada Foundation.
“Four and a half million people in the diaspora is not a joke. Health tourism is a market we seriously need to tap into,” Mascoll said during Gleaner Editors’ Forum on ‘Engaging the Diaspora for Growth’, held last Friday at the newspaper’s Kingston offices.
“I certainly don’t want to spend my twilight years in the cold. I would much prefer to spend it in Negril or Ocho Rios, but there are things you need to put in place. The fundamental right of every Jamaican is personal security, which is a problem in this country. Old people ‘fraid.”
Willing, but needs gov’t support
Mascoll continued: “But when you reach 75 and you want somewhere to come and retire that is sunny, where you can see a doctor and there is a clinic, we have the capacity to put those things in place. And there are also people in the diaspora who will come here and build those places, once the crime has been dealt with. Jamaicans will come any time, no matter what, but foreigners will not do that.”
Lending her support to the concern, Valarie Steele, president of the Jamaican Diaspora Canada Foundation, said expatriates were willing to walk miles with the Jamaican Government to improve health care and develop health tourism. All they require is that the Government walk that journey with them.“I can’t think of a better place to recuperate from anything than Jamaica. As long as the bureaucracy does not prevent us from going forward, we are in it for the long haul. Many of us no longer have a foot in the grave, we have a whole leg, so it behoves us to make sure that we help Jamaica to rise,” said Steele.
She said Jamaica’s deal with the Sunnybrook Hospital in Canada is one such move, as it works to ensure that Jamaican hospitals reach their full potential to later move to engage in health tourism.
“On an interesting note, a Jamaican doctor is behind the American Global MD Group, a consortium of about 50 doctors from North Carolina in the United States, which will be building Jamaica’s five-star medical 200-room hospital in Rose Hall, Montego Bay, for wellness tourism,” added Mark Thomas, chairman of the diaspora marketing committee at JAMPRO, the Jamaican Government’s tourism and investment promotion agency.
Arnaldo Brown, state minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, said members of the diaspora were now also organising to invest US$200 million to build a health facility in Negril.
Brown noted that at this year’s conference, now under way in Montego Bay, St James, they would also seek to bring other investors on board to tap into the global multibillion-dollar health tourism industry.
