Medical tourism - In conversation with Dr Tshepo Maaka

Dr Tshepo Maaka is the founder and owner of the Parktown-based Serokolo Health Tourism (Pty) Limited. Serokolo Health Tourism is an innovative health services company of a team of passionate and dedicated professionals. The company’s core service is providing health tourism to tourists.

Through hard work and impeccable service delivery, Serokolo Health Tourism has managed to capture a large portion African medical tourism market and is well positioned to take advantage of the ever growing global medical tourism market.

What is medical tourism?
Well in order to answer that, one needs firstly to define a tourist. A tourist is anyone who travels to a place other than their usual environment for business or pleasure. By combining a tourist's willingness to travel with their medical needs; medical tourism was born.

Serokolo Health Tourism offers medical tours and health retreats specifically tailored to the needs of groups and individuals in both private and corporate sectors.

Health tourism is not limited to international tourists it is also available to local tourists. In many instances, the facilities available in Johannesburg (for example) are not available to patients in outlying areas. In such cases, Serokolo Health Tourism will act on the patient’s behalf to secure appointments with specialists and liaise with hospitals to arrange admission if required.

In both instances, local and foreign tourists, Serokolo Health Tourism handles the needs of their clients from end to end. They are “hand held” from arrival to departure and throughout their stay by the case managers and team at Serokolo Health Tourism ensuring their stay is pleasant and recovery speedy. Serokolo offers health tours and health retreats to tourists, mixing health and medical care with a magnificent South African holiday. Around the office, this is known as the “Serokolo Difference”.

Serokolo is a name of an indigenous medical herb mostly used by the Bapedi of Limpopo. It is used to heal different kinds of ailments and diseases.
South Africa is known worldwide to be a pioneer in human to human heart transplantation and even the invention of the CAT scan. Also as opposed to the medical costs in the West, South Africa is still reasonable. Among African countries South Africa has the best medical equipment and that is one reason why many western prefer to have some of their operations
Tshepo Maaka is a medical doctor by profession. After finishing high school education at Motse Marian, Limpopo when she was born, she went to study medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand. She worked in the private sector for a short period and decided to study further specialising in anaesthesiology and public health.
She worked for various hospitals amongst them are Netcare and Mediclinic. After 11 years in the medical field she stopped working and started Serokolo Health Tourism (Pty) Limited in April 2004.

She took it upon herself to attract international health and medical patients to South for cost effective quality medical procedures from our best doctors while they enjoy a South African holiday. See saw a business opportunity because of the affordable medical costs in South Africa as opposed to their countries.

She had to dig deep into her own pocket to do market research for her innovation and it is now paying dividends. With love for health promotion and medical care and the passion she has for the tourism industry, she managed to start something she’ll treasure forever.
Asked why left security and a safety net of the corporate sector? She replied, “Nothing will ever stop the passion and love I have for innovation. Running my own business gives me the platform to be innovative and the ability to do what I love at my own pace and time. Its time Africans did it for themselves and follow President Mbeki’s Nepad dream”.