Call for more private investment in healthcare

Medical tourism can only be possible if private health care services are expanded and revamped. This call was made during an evaluation workshop aimed at finding possibilities of cooperation between the Swedish government and Rwandan health care actors in Kigali. Rwanda has embarked on promoting medical tourism to help reduce on cases of Rwandans travelling abroad for medical care. “There is need to avail world class health facilities through private investments. This way, we shall not only attract medical travelers but will also save the money our citizens spend on going abroad for treatment,” Hubert Ruzibiza, the head of services development at Rwanda Development Board (RDB) said at the forum last week. Rwanda currently has two general private referral hospitals (Croix du Sud Hospital, commonly known as Kwa Nyirinkwaya; and Polyclinique La Medicale, commonly known as Kwa-Kanimba) all in Kigali. Ruzibiza said in the past one year, about $50 million worth of direct investments were made in private health care, saying that much as this is substantial, more investments were still required. He added that close to 1,000 foreign patients were registered in private hospitals as of 2013 alone. “Rwanda has succeeded in fighting common diseases like malaria and HIV/Aids, the challenge now is to turn to non communicable ones like cancer, diabetes and heart ailments,” said Dr Jean Nyirinkwaya, the chairperson of Rwanda Healthcare Federation (RHF). Recent years have also seen more specialised private hospitals open shop, for instance in January 2013, one of the major global eye care centres, Dr Agarwal’s Eye Hospital (from India) opened in Rwanda. The facility, which cost about $6 million, handles complicated eye cases like retina surgery, hi-tech cataract surgery, glaucoma, paediatric ophthalmology and corneal transplantation. Quite similarly, in April this year, the country got its first fertility clinic. The facility, that cost $350,000 (Rwf237 million), offers services like; in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a fertility treatment procedure that enables an egg to be fertilised by a sperm in the laboratory, HIV/Aids sperm washing, Intra–uterine Insemination (IUI), egg freezing and storage, among others.

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Call for more private investment in healthcare