TEHRAN - Construction of a giant healthcare complex began on Thursday with a ground-breaking ceremony in Iran’s southern Qeshm Island, ISNA reported.

“This project could enhance health (and medical) tourism capacity of the country by two fold,” Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs Masood Soltanifar said, speaking on the sidelines of the ceremony.

An indigenous investor and 75 medical specialists are shareholders of the multidimensional project, which is locally known as “Qeshm healthcare village”, the report said.

“Currently, Iran hosts some 500 to 600 thousands of people who come from neighboring countries per annum for medical treatments. And, proximity of Qeshm to Persian Gulf littoral states could double the number…,” Soltanifar explained.

The project is being constructed on a land area of 122 thousand square meters, in three phases of medical, tourist and leisure facilities.

The official data shows that foreign patients are drawn by affordable treatments and high quality of services. Most of them come from neighboring Iraq, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and some come from as far away as Eastern Europe.

Medical tourism made an economic contribution of around $1.2 billion to the country in the Iranian calendar year 1396 (March 2017-March 2018), said the head of Medical Tourism Department at the Ministry of Health.

According to Saeid Hashemzadeh, Iran attracted around 300,000 medical tourists in the year 1396 and the number nearly doubled over the year 1397 (March 2018-March 2019).

Iran has set its goals to exceed its yearly medical travelers to around 2 million in [calendar year] 1404, he added.

In May 2018, Mohammad Jahangiri who presides over a national center for developing health tourism said that Iran has the capacity to annually earn $7 billion in medical and health tourism, though the sector now brings in only one-seventh or even lesser of the sum.

AFM/MQ/MG