Severe angina (chest pain) accompanied by perspiration drove British national, Ian Stanley Brown, to his physician in London. After reviewing his stress ECG, the doctor advised him to undergo a coronary angiography. Ideally, the patient would have undergone the procedure within the next 3-4 days. However, being a National Health Service (NHS) beneficiary, Brown was put on a waiting list time of a year, before he could undergo an angiography in one of the NHS hospitals in the UK. Subsequently, if he needed an angioplasty or a bypass surgery, he would have to wait for an additional eight months to a year. Although Brown has been contributing to the NHS for 40 years, the health system in the UK is so overloaded, he says, that most patients have to wait for months to get diagnosed and then get dates for surgery.

Ian Stanley Brown from the UK is hale and hearty after undergoing angioplasty at WHHI

"I had two choices: one to stay at home or to undertake cardiac treatment elsewhere. I chose to come to India. Having heard about Indian healthcare expertise and being convinced that the services here are of global standards, I decided to undergo my angioplasty at the Wockhardt hospital in director of an electronics Bangalore," says Brown, who is a company in London.

Brown was discharged 48 hours after a successful angioplasty procedure performed by Dr. Ranganath Nayak, International Cardiologist. The cost of his heart treatment was one-third of what it would have cost him in the UK.

Vishal Bali, Vice-President - Operations, Wockhardt Hospitals says, "Just as information technology has made India the IT destination of the world, medical tourism has the potential to make India a global health care destination. We believe that patients like Ian Brown who choose to come to India for treatment are ambassadors of the quality standards of Indian healthcare."