“The treatment isn’t available at home” is said as one sentence, but it is not one situation. It is at least three, and which one you are facing changes what the useful next step is — whether the answer is to escalate something at home, to get your case reviewed independently, or to plan treatment in another country. This page is the frame for our availability guides: it separates the three situations, describes what travelling for treatment actually involves once the decision is real, and is honest about what a facilitator can and cannot do.
What are the three ways treatment becomes unavailable at home?
The procedure is not performed where you live. Some treatments need infrastructure or programme volume that a country’s health system has not built — complex cardiac surgery, certain cancer programmes, advanced interventional work. When there is no local programme at all, there is no queue to join and no cap to argue with; the question is only where, and how to get there safely.
The system covers you in principle and rations you in practice. This is the situation our guide to elective surgery wait times in the UK, Canada and Australia is about: the treatment exists, you are eligible for it, but a prioritised queue stands between you and a date. A close cousin is the funding ceiling: a national health scheme that nominally covers a treatment but caps what it will pay, so the covered part stops partway and the rest becomes a private decision. Our Kenya SHA cap guide walks through that version — what a scheme ceiling does mid-treatment, and what the realistic options are when it does.
The specialist capacity is not there. The third situation is the quietest. The procedure may exist in the country; what is scarce is the specialist — the subspecialist your specific condition needs, in a city you can reach, with the volume that comes from doing the work often. Population-to-specialist ratios, concentration in a single capital city, and long private-pay distances all show up here. Our guide for patients from Nigeria looks at this situation from the patient’s side: what it is like to need a particular specialist and not be able to reach one, and what the practical options look like from there.
The reason the three-way split matters is practical. If the procedure does not exist locally, no amount of escalation produces it. If the queue is the problem, your priority category is a lever you can pull before anything else. If specialist capacity is the problem, the honest question is whether the right specialist exists anywhere within reach — and that is answerable before you book anything.
What does travelling for treatment actually involve?
Stripped of the brochures, a well-run journey has five stages, and the order matters.
Your records travel first. Reports, imaging, clinic letters and test results are assembled and shared — through a secure link, not a public form — because nothing can be reviewed without them.
An independent review answers the clinical questions. Before any travel is planned, a specialist relevant to your condition reviews the file and answers, in writing, whether the advised treatment is the standard approach for your case and what the alternatives are. This step costs a small fixed fee and can save you from an unnecessary journey; it can also give you confidence to make the journey.
Itemized quotes come from hospitals, in writing. Not a package headline: a per-case, line-by-line quote for your case — surgeon and anaesthesia fees, theatre, the named implant or device class where relevant, room category and included nights, included tests, and the exclusion list. You can hold a quote like that to account; you cannot hold a brochure number to anything.
The hospital is paid directly. Treatment costs go to the hospital, against its own invoice. Any facilitation fee sits separately and is published, so there is no commission layer hidden inside the hospital bill — which is also how quotes stay comparable and honest.
Handover closes the journey. Discharge documents, operative notes and follow-up plans travel home with you, so your own doctors can take over continuity of care rather than start from scratch.
Our treatment facilitation page describes how we run these stages end to end, and our fees — $50 for a remote consultation, $150 for a written independent second opinion, $1,000 flat for full journey coordination, each credited in full to the next step — are published before you share a single report.
What does the journey look like from your country?
Every corridor we publish has its own guide under treatment in India from your country, covering the practical layer: the visa route, reaching and paying a hospital from abroad, and how coordination works from that country. Three of the guides we point people to first are patients from Kenya, patients from Nigeria and patients from Sierra Leone — each one grounded in the realities of that corridor rather than in generic advice.
If your situation is the queue rather than the missing programme, our second pillar — the guide to elective surgery wait times in the UK, Canada and Australia — and its companions on what a written second opinion settles while you wait cover the levers that exist inside the system before travel enters the comparison.
What can a facilitator honestly do — and not do?
The honest edges of this service deserve their own paragraph, not fine print.
We coordinate; we do not practise medicine. Medtu Care is a medical travel facilitator, not a hospital. We arrange the independent review, obtain the quotes, and coordinate the journey; the clinical decisions rest with you and your treating doctors, in India and at home.
Sometimes the honest answer is to stay home. An independent review can confirm that the plan at home is right, or that the advised treatment can proceed where you live with a change of approach or priority. When that happens, the review has done its job. A facilitation service that only ever ends in a plane ticket is not giving you an independent read.
No one can promise you an outcome. What can be promised is process: itemized quotes in writing, no commissions from hospitals, fees published in advance. What cannot be promised is a result, and any service that does promise one is telling you something about itself.
Where do you go from here?
If you are unsure which of the three situations you are in, that uncertainty is itself the first thing to resolve — and it can be resolved from home. A written independent second opinion reviews the reports you already have and answers the questions that decide the rest: is the advised treatment the standard approach for this case, what are the alternatives, and what is worth taking back to your own doctors. From there, whichever direction the answer points, the fees page sets out every cost of working with us before you share a single report.