Investigating the relationship between the pillars of hospital hotel services and the components of attracting medical tourists in selected private hospitals in Tehran

Medical tourism is one of the important sub-branches of the tourism industry. One of the factors influencing the choice of hospital by the tourist is the way of providing hotel services in hospitals.

The research was a descriptive correlational study conducted in 2009 in selected private hospitals in Tehran. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect information about the components of hoteling and a Shahroudi questionnaire was used to examine the observance of the components affecting the attraction of health tourists. The samples included 78 employees of the international department of two private hospitals in Tehran. To measure normality, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests and multivariate regression and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to measure and determine the relationship between variables by SPSS 21.

This study showed that there is a significant relationship between the six pillars of hospital hotels with the attraction of medical tourists. Pillars of "buildings and installations" (p <0.05), (r = 0.231), "equipment and facilities" (p <0.05), (r = 0.263), "welfare services" (P <0.05), (r = 0.357), "cleaning and hygiene services" (p <0.05) and (r = 0.234), "nutrition" (p <0.01), (r = 0.393), and "administrative affairs and workflow" (p <0.01), (r = 0.332), are directly correlated with the attraction of medical tourists. It was also found that "human resources" is not correlated with the attraction of medical tourists.

In order to attract more medical tourists, it’s necessary that hospital managers and health policy makers pay more attention to the hoteling pillars, especially "nutrition" and "administrative affairs and workflow", which have the most correlation with attracting medical tourists.