The Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi is hopeful of becoming a medical tourism destination, despite price increases in Kenya’s top hospitals of up to 40% in 4 months, recent publicity surrounding the kidnapping of a tourist by Somali “pirates” and general concerns about the safety and security of visitors.

Aga Khan University Hospital recently completed its first surgery enabled via video links. The hospital argues that video conference surgery offers limitless opportunities for procedures that Kenyans have been shopping for abroad, largely because of the high costs of the treatment locally and, in some cases, because of the long waiting times at public hospitals with the capacity to perform the operations.

Besides the direct benefits to patients, it offers local doctors an opportunity to link with more experienced and skilled surgeons in other countries dictating instructions to their local counterparts. These could help form the next knowledge pool for training future doctors, hopefully helping reduce the personnel deficit that has left only 7000 doctors serving in Kenya compared to a demand of 24,000.

The procedure also promises better linkages between doctors in hospitals in remote areas and specialists in leading private and referral hospitals that would help perform delicate procedures without patients having to be transferred. Infrastructure challenges limit the potential to which telemedicine can be practised in Kenya outside the main urban centres. The technology requires a dependable bandwidth in a sector where precision is, literally a matter of life and death; so this needs new fibre optic cables to major centres in Kenya. Electricity is not installed in remote outposts. The hospital hopes that once these problems are dealt with, Kenya will be on the way to becoming a medical tourism destination for other African countries.

Reference:http://www.zimbio.com/Types+of+Arthritis/articles/K-4ksT24mzf/How+can+arthritis+prevented+Arthritis+Research