Factor Analysis of Effective Factors on the Improvement of Medical Tourism in Shiraz Megalopolis

Abstract

Medical tourism refers to an international phenomenon of an individual’s travel in which most tourists travel long to access to treatment-therapeutic services who because of high cost, long waits, lacking in insurance, and use of services and lack of access to health services in the destination.

In terms of nature, the present study is qualitative, in terms of objective, it is applied and in terms of the way of controlling variables and collecting the data, it is experimental, which has been conducted in 2012-2013 in Shiraz Megalopolis. The population of the present study includes foreign and domestic medical tourists who travelled to Shiraz for their medical treatment. For foreign tourists, 400 samples and for domestic ones 400 samples were selected using the Cochran formula. The data collecting tools is researcher-made questionnaire with 109 questions which were scored Likert scale. The data were calculated using SPSS and through factor analysis.

The factors of “the price of treatment and tourist services”, “the quality of treatment and tourist services”, “treatment and tourist facilities, capabilities and equipment”, “ICT” and “culture” which have the highest roles in improving medical tourism.

The high quality of treatment and tourist services, applying capabilities and modern equipment compatible with universal standards in treatment and tourist domain, applying ICT in the domains of advertisement and marketing and promoting the level of the culture of accepting tourism result in improvement medical tourism in Megalopolis Shiraz.