Volkswacht Bodensee - Turkish clinics vie for UK medical tourists' custom in London

Around 100 Turkish clinics set up stalls at the foot of Westminster Abbey last month for the London International Health Tourism Expo trade fair, where businesses displayed banners touting triumphant hair transplants, IVF treatments and discount dentistry.

British newspapers regularly carry horror stories about botched operations, but that has done little to dissuade the hundreds of thousands of UK medical tourists who travel abroad for treatment each year.

At the event, AFP met Amber Dee, a 48-year-old woman who got dental implants in Turkey three years ago and is now looking for cosmetic eyelid surgery.

"It's so expensive here!" said Dee, who is British and of Turkish origin.

She told AFP she paid around £8,000 ($10,350) for a full set of dental implants in Turkey after being told it would cost £4,000 for a single tooth in the UK.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of British people who received medical treatment abroad almost doubled between 2021 and 2023, rising from 234,000 to 431,000.

- Backlogs and botched surgeries -

Faced with backlogs in the NHS public health service, many refuse to spend months and even years on waiting lists or switch to the expensive private system.

And in the last two years, almost one in five Britons who have been unable to get an appointment at the dentist have decided to go abroad, according to an Ipsos poll for the PA news agency published on Friday.

"Healthcare accessibility is a big problem, and another one is the private healthcare prices, so we are trying to make it smooth and easier for UK patients," said Merve Sarigul, a UK sales representative for Turkey's Acibadem private hospital group.

Sarigul said the company was offering procedures ranging "from plastic surgery to organ transplantation".

British influencers and reality TV celebrities such as Katie Price have extensively documented their cosmetic procedures from lip flips and butt lifts, advertising clinics to their millions of followers online.

But more than 300 patients needed hospital care in the UK after botched surgery abroad between 2018 and 2022, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons.

In March last year, a government minister told parliament that at least 28 British nationals had died in Turkey following elective medical procedures since 2019.

Jonathan Edelheit, head of the US-based Medical Tourism Association, said some patients make "poor choices" by seeking out "the lowest cost provider and trusting anyone online", and urged people to opt for accredited facilities.

To boost confidence, Turkey introduced a system of compulsory certification in 2017 for its roughly 4,000 facilities treating foreign patients, who numbered around two million in 2024.

But even certified clinics have been accused of bungling operations.

Last year, French student Mathieu Vigier Latour took his own life after a botched beard transplant at a certified clinic in Istanbul, his father said.

"We take health very seriously, and we believe one-to-one conversations create less room for errors," said Ilayda Secer, deputy general manager of the trade fair in London.

Since 2023, the Turkish group ALZ International has organised a dozen similar events in Berlin, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Baku and Moscow, drawing thousands of visitors.

B.Baumann--VB