Why We Turn Some Enquiries Down

The obvious commercial problem

We charge for non-medical visit support. Every enquiry we decline is revenue we do not take. So it is fair to ask why we would decline any of them.

The answer is that we are not selling a treatment, and therefore cannot use a treatment sale to justify a bad fit. A clinic that accepts everyone has a financial reason to. We only have the logistics, and logistics for the wrong trip is just an expensive way to be in the wrong place.

The four we say no to

These come up often enough that they are worth naming.

• Medical emergencies. If somebody describes sudden vision loss, trauma, or a condition worsening by the day, the answer is their local emergency service, today. A seven-day visit support service on another continent is the wrong instrument, and saying otherwise would be dangerous.
• People asking us to tell them whether to have surgery. That is a clinical question. We are not qualified, and paying us does not change that. We will say so plainly rather than give a confident answer that sounds like advice.
• Cases where no hospital has agreed to see them, and they want us to "arrange it". We can help with the practical side of an agreed visit. We cannot manufacture an acceptance, and we will not imply that we can.
• People who want a visa letter, an invitation, or a document that implies a hospital relationship. We are not the hospital and will not issue anything that suggests we are.

What we say instead

For emergencies: call local emergency services. No hedging.

For clinical questions: ask the hospital, in writing, and ask your own doctor at home. We will help you phrase the question, and we will not answer it for you.

For unagreed cases: go to the hospital's own international office first. If they say no, that is an answer, and it is better to have it before you book a flight than after.

For documents: we can confirm what we actually are — an independent non-medical service — and nothing more.

Why this is not modesty

There is a version of this page that reads as false humility: the honest company that turns away business. That is not the point.

The point is that the boundary is the product. If we answered clinical questions, we would be a medical advice service without a licence and without insurance. If we promised appointments, we would be selling something we do not control. If we issued hospital-flavoured documents, we would be committing a specific kind of fraud that the hospitals themselves are entitled to object to.

Each refusal protects the thing we can actually deliver: showing up, on the day, with a car, an interpreter, a plan and somebody who knows where the registration counter is.

What a good enquiry looks like

Approximate dates. How many people are travelling. Whether the hospital has already been contacted. What practical help is needed — transport, accommodation, language, accompaniment, family support.

You do not need to send medical records at this stage, and we will not ask for them. We can describe our scope and our price without seeing your file, and if we cannot help, we would rather tell you in the first reply than in the third invoice.