Jordan's health sector attracted more than 250,000 patients from abroad last year, registering an eight percent increase over the previous year, according to the Private Hospitals' Association (PHA) chairman, Fawzi Hammouri.
Hammouri told Petra on Monday after recently participating in the World Medical Tourism & Global Healthcare Congress in Washington, DC, that "the rising number of Jordanian and Arab medical tourism patients is an indication of the growing demand for Jordan's private hospitals sector, which will lead to more new hospitals being set up." In regard to the nationalities of the patients who sought treatment in Jordan during 2013, Hammouri said that Saudi Arabia ranked first, followed by Iraq, Libya, Palestine and Yemen, in addition to a number of foreign countries.
The PHA chairman briefed the US conference about Jordan's experience in dealing with Arab revolution's outcome and the mechanism by which the health sector, particularly private hospitals, managed the process of receiving and treating large number of wounded and patients in those countries.
Hammouri's presentation also tackled the repercussion of the Syrian crisis on Jordan's health sector, stressing the need for international bodies and organizations to provide adequate support to the country to enable it to deal with these exceptional circumstances in the light of the ever increasing numbers of refugees.
At the conference, the PHA agreed with specialized institutions in the field of medical tourism to organize an exploratory visit to Jordan to learn about the available medical potential in the country, according to Hammouri.