a country · Sri LankaSri Lanka

A country with free public healthcare, strong population health for its income, and a short list of things it cannot do at home. Sri Lankans travel to India for cancer care, transplants and complex cardiac surgery; Colombo's private hospitals take a smaller flow the other way, mostly from the Maldives and from Sri Lankans living abroad. No official count of either direction was read for this record.

Trade practice — the journey most Sri Lankan patients make is the short one to South India: Chennai above all, sometimes Bengaluru. It is a flight of about an hour, the referral often comes from a Colombo consultant who trained in India, and the cost is met out of pocket or by family abroad.

Inference — Sri Lanka is a demonstration of a point this directory keeps running into. A health system can deliver long life expectancy and low child mortality at low cost and still leave a gap at the top of the acuity range, and it is that gap, not the average, that produces medical travel. Comparing countries by health spending per person will not find it.

The Ministry of Health publishes an Annual Health Bulletin as the national statistics series. No foreign-patient figure was read from it for this record, and this page carries none.

Trade practice — Colombo's private hospitals bill in rupees, itemise rather than package, and arrange Indian referrals through named consultants rather than through agencies. Foreign-exchange controls and the cost of the flight shape what a family can actually buy, and the economic crisis of 2022 — with its medicine shortages — moved that line for several years.

As of 16 September 2026 this record carries no patient count and no price for Sri Lanka. Both are gaps in the record, marked for verification, not statements about the country.