They don´t mind about the price. For them is more relevant to have access to a quality private health. These people come from Bolivia, Perú, Argentina, Brazil, USA ore ven Southafrica.

The strong development of the private area, that has allowed increasing the medical offer, incorporate new technologies and the more advanced treatments, it is putting Chile in a place of leadership in Latin America.

Many of these patients come to Chile because they don´t count on the treatments in their countries, or else because they know the prestige of the Chilean Medicine, to which they also add hundreds of foreign residents in our nation for working or studies reasons.
In the world, this practice is known as "medical tourism", a service that only in the year 2008 moved around 60 thousand million dollars in the planet.

Bolivians, Peruvians, Argentineans, Brazilians, North Americans and even South Africans have arrived to Santiago Salud net to carry out treatments of great complexity (cancer, bariatric surgeries, traumatological surgeries, hip and knee surgeries, ophthalmological surgeries, etc).

During the last five years this demand of foreigners has grown exponentially, to the point that today our partner clinics of Santiago Salud are promoted through publicity and paid reports in media of other countries.

Four clinic centers are the ones composing Santiago Salud (Clinic of Universidad Católica, Fundación Arturo López Pérez, Clínica Oftalmológica Luis Pasteur and Hospital del Trabajador in Santiago), instance promoting and providing the access to the medical services of their associates to the Latin-American community and of other continents.

The result of these associations is that the volume of persons coming from abroad has sustainedly grown in the last years, getting to triple in quantity.

One of the great reasons motivating foreigners to come to be attended to in Chile is the exclusivity of certain treatments, like the surgery of leg implant carried out by Hospital del Trabajador, unique center carrying out this surgery in North America and South America.

With respect to the profile of the patient arriving from abroad to be attended to, María Lidia Fuenzalida, commercial chief of clinic UC, explains that "they are people from all social stratum, looking for solutions to urgent problems or that they hang over a long time ago", at the same time adds that the flow "is constant during the year, but in these months of spring, in general, people come to have checkups because they suffer some pathology".