Abstract:

Medical tourism is an integral part of the tourism economy in Uganda. Whereas, in bound medical tourism is still far from Uganda’s potential owing to the meagre investments in health sector more government officials are now traveling abroad than ever before spending a lot of taxpayers’ money for high quality care. Despite the increasing medical referrals abroad there is a paucity of data in the medical tourism sector. The objective of this study was to determine the role of a National Health Insurance Scheme in reducing the costs of medical referrals abroad. An exploratory cross-sectional mixed study was done from September 2023 to August 2024. Stratified and snowball sampling was used to select 34 participants. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 16.0 and thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. The findings indicated that the National Health Insurance scheme is proposed as a possible option to provide affordable high-quality care to all developing an excellent health system for prompt and quality medical treatment when needed both for medical tourists and Ugandans. The National Health insurance scheme is a policy choice most likely to provide equal access to quality healthcare and reduce on high costs of medical referrals abroad of the government officials. This paper recommends the development of a medical tourism policy as a main driver of the industry.

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