What are hospitals and healthcare like in Thailand? Pretty comprehensive is the answer!
Look at us. All is well, or so we thought.
We are just having our annual medical check-ups.
This is something we have to have for our health and life Insurance in Thailand.
It is different from our lives in Australia, there are some age-related health screening programs (for breast and bowel cancer for example), but mostly our doctors will largely advise health care screening, only when issues of concern arise.
Going to Bumrungrad International Hospital, Bangkok is like arriving at a posh hotel. There is staff everywhere, and even someone to push the right lift button for you.
You’re half expecting a welcome drink until you remember you are supposed to be fasting for your bloods.
It is so multicultural. They are very well set up to help in a myriad of languages.
Indeed on arrival at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport, you will also find the major hospitals have a presence to meet and greet, their stands can be found close to the Tourist Information Centre.
Medical tourism is big business in Thailand.
Our annual medical checkups are part of my husband’s work package here in Thailand. Before we were offered Thai healthcare and life insurance cover, we underwent a massive medical in Australia less than 12 months ago. So we breezed down to our medicals, pretty confident with a hop, skip and a jump into our snazzy beige gowns.
We should have guessed that with a combined age of over 110 years and a country that makes millions on medical tourism that they were going to find something that required further investigation…
Bumrungrad is extremely well organised, and although you are on a massive human conveyer belt for each test, one out, one in, they managed to treat each of us as individuals.
After the initial check-in where we filled out a medical questionnaire, we are taken through a succession of areas, starting with meeting a nurse who checks our blood pressure, height, weight and takes our blood.
We then change into our gowns for the chest x-ray, and each woman is given a scarf to wear. Being an individual I dig out my favourite scarf to wear! We give in our urine and stool samples and head off for me the mammogram and both of us for the abdominal ultrasound.
I’d had concerns about having a chest x-ray, given that I’d had a chest x-ray, a mammogram and a breast ultrasound as part of my previous medical 12 months ago and I prefer to keep my radiation levels as low as possible in this beautiful, but toxic city!
We sit in the waiting room, reading how Bangkok’s pollution level is at an extreme health warning level and is currently worst than Beijing.
However talking to a long-term friend suggests that I have every test included in my Executive Medical in the first year, then try and get back into the schedule as recommended in Australia, once the hospital had the base levels of test results.
It was great advice, the packages on offer are on a take it or leave it basis, there is no reduction for not having different tests. I was happy to do this provided that they used a thyroid guard during my chest x-ray, which was duly produced but with the warning that it would obscure a total picture.
Of course, there was an issue, the thyroid guard was obscuring clear vision, I was offered the opportunity for a retake of the x-ray, but as my notes state the patient declined!
I was about to get stroppy when I pass Mr Wren in the corridor, they’ve found something on my kidney he says, they’ve got something in my chest I reply!
We meet again in a bigger waiting room, where breakfast provided by the Marriot hotel is on offer. It’s not quite an all you can eat breakfast buffet, but it’s not bad. In between coffee and cake we head off to see the optometrist.
Once all the Executive medical tests are complete, we could have also chosen a whole load of add-ons screenings (bone density, hormone markers etc) we head to see the Doctor for the results.
I thought it was slightly weird that we were given our results together, although it was useful for us both to hear eachothers problems!
At the end of the medical, we will be sent a full report, both in written and e-mail version with a memory stick of all our results. I’m thinking my Doctor in Australia is either going to be so impressed by this, or worried!
It was such a horrible week, the final outcomes were fine, there was no cause for concern. This was after eight hours of follow-up consultations with further X-rays, MRI’s and CT scans.
Thank goodness we have that medical insurance because although it is way cheaper than in our home countries, it sure does add up!
If I hadn’t been so exhausted by all the appointments, I would have given the Doctors a piece of my mind. I’m sure the stress of this healthcare screening has taken years off our lives in this world.
The only upside was I must have lost heaps of weight because I was also told I needed to lose 12 kilos!
Do you have a regular heathcare screening program? What do you think? Are we over screening these days?
X is for X-rays and Bangkok medicals and part of
Blogging from A to Z April (2018) Challenge.
Click here to see the list of all participants!
Thanks so much to the organisers
2 comments
Wow, that’s a lot of screening. I’d never heard of medical tourism before reading this post. So interesting!
I don’t really know if we are over-screening, but I do think some conditions that we claim to suffer from now have long existed without so much as a complaint from the sufferer before the tests existed.
That is amazing! I think many people in the US expect that modern medicine in some other countries is less “modern” than here, but this sounds like it exceeds anything most of us have seen!