How good is the health care where you’re travelling? In some countries, you can count on good care anywhere; in others, you’re fine if you stick to a big city but really don’t want to have an emergency out in the boonies.
This Health Risk Map, prepared by International SOS, rates countries on the state of their medical systems. They’re a company that provides emergency medical services for corporations, so they focus on whether they would choose to evacuate you or bring you to a local hospital. Still, the map can be useful as a tool for planning travel: just how risky would it be to get seriously sick or injured in your vacation spot?
Some countries don’t fall into an easy category: there may be a huge difference in care between urban and rural areas, or between public and private hospital systems. Those countries are shown in brown on the map, and some are explained in more detail in this interview with NPR. Check out the link below for the full map.
Comments
3 responses to “The Best And Worst Countries For Medical Care”
Be interesting to see a timeline of the countries mainly Africa to see if they have always had bad medical cover or they had good cover then got worse.
Australia as a green with best services? Really? are you joking?
Health care is terrible here. Not a 3rd world country but definitely can’t compare to any European countries marked as green or even marked as yellow..
What a rubbish..
Much of this depends on whether you have private cover or insurance. When travelling overseas this is a must unless going to a country with reciprocal Medicare rights (e.g. the UK).
Even in developing countries, healthcare can be high-end Western standards if you’re willing to pay or are covered. For example, when visiting Vanuatu we found a private clinic run by Kiwis which wouldn’t have looked out of place in NZ.
Conversely the healthcare available in some of the “green” countries can be very variable. This especially applies in large nations where the population is concentrated in large cities, such as the US or Aus. The setup in some rural hospitals can be quite basic with tertiary specialist services many hundreds of kms away. So try to have your heart attack or car accident near a major metro hospital rather than out beyond Oona-woop-woop.