The medical community in the Philippines has its eye on making the country another Asian medical tourism destination. There are plenty of good doctors and a plethora of trained nurses in the country. But they are continually leaving for greener pastures in the west. If successful in developing the Philippines as a destination for foreigners to seek medical care they could stem the tide of health care workers leaving the country as well as grow revenues for the nation.

The problem they are struggling with is the lack of a well thought out and implemented system of medical liability rules. In an effort to get something in place it appears that regulators have gone overboard, at least that’s how the medical professionals feel. Currently proposed legislation would punish a doctor for a mistake by imposing a jail term of six months to 12 years, permanent loss of medical license, and up to 1 million peso fine. Spokespersons for the medical profession say that is over the top and would make doctors so fearful of the punishment for making an honest mistake that they would be even more motivated to leave the country.

Others are advocating putting in place a system of medical malpractice insurance and scrapping the proposed legislation that would jail doctors if they make a mistake. It will be interesting to see how this develops. If they go the route of malpractice insurance then the follow-on issue is how large will insurance settlements be, and will the courts be invoked to award enormous windfalls to injured parties, ala the U.S. system, with the resulting sky rocketing cost of medical care.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Medical Tourism News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.