Poland's hopes that the European Union will lift barriers to its workers and services companies may be fading in the wake of EU constitutional and summit stalemates, but the country is far from despairing.
Instead, Polish workers and service providers are responding by by luring rich EU customers directly to Poland. Germans, Britons, and Scandinavians are the most eager customers so far, attracted primarily by low prices.
That is how a Berlin woman ended up having a tummy tuck at the Art Medica plastic surgery clinic in the city of Szczecin. “I could never have had this operation in Germany. It would have been twice as expensive,” she said while lying in her private room.
The clinic, with gleaming floors, stained glass windows and top-end medical equipment, gets about three-quarters of its business from foreigners, mostly from Germany.
Szczecin is just over an hour's drive from Berlin, and the clinic will arrange for a driver to pick up a patient from a Berlin airport, find a local hotel and even arrange for shopping trips while he or she awaits surgery.
Breast enhancement surgery one of the most popular procedures costs about €3,000 ($3,700, £2,000) at the clinic, while a similar operation in Germany costs about €5,000. An experienced Polish doctor earns about 4,000 zlotys a month ($1,200,€980, £660), about one seventh of what doctors earn in Britain.
Many other medical service providers have seen the possibilities and are jumping into the market.
Tomasz Cegielski, a Szczecin dentist, gets about a third of his clients from abroad, mainly from Germany and Scandinavia. “We charge at least half price for the same standard of work,” he said. Some patients are a little nervous, having heard about Poland's communist-era health services, where technologically backward hospitals, bribes, and dirt were the order of the day.
The situation may not be a lot better for most Poles who have to rely on the financially strained government medical system. But for foreigners going to private clinics, the standards are often better than those in western Europe.
Most of the trans-border service providers are in western Poland, close to Germany. The medical sector got a huge boost when Poland entered the EU just over a year ago, allowing Europeans to be reimbursed by their national medical insurance. Travel Medical, a company that seeks foreign customers for healthcare clinics, got into the business about 10 months ago. It has been helped by the appearance of low-cost airlines in central Europe, another spin-off of EU membership. Now a flight from Britain to Wroclaw, a south-western city, costs about €100 return. Britons are Travel Medical's best customers.
“It's a new area and its dynamically expanding,” said Rafal Gadlucki, a company spokesman. “Polish prices will take a while to catch up to those in western Europe. For the next five or 10 years this will still be a good business.”
Not only doctors and dentists are succeeding in attracting price-conscious clients from the west.
Krzysztof Zybortowicz attracts German clients to his garage in Szczecin. They leave their cars, do a little shopping and a few hours later are home. “I do charge them a little higher price than for Poles but they still seem pleased,” he said.
The trend is so new that government statistical agencies still have little idea of the size of the trend. For now the evidence is anecdotal, but its impact can be seen in almost every city in western Poland, where many medical and dental offices as well as restaurants, strip clubs and garages have signs in German and English.
For those who can't travel to Poland, Poland comes to them. In the UK, an increasing number of homeowners ask a Polish carpenter to measure their kitchens, and then get the bulk of the cabinet work done in Poland.
Polish plumbers, much feared and maligned by French counterparts, still haven't figured out how to match that service.
By Jan Cienski in Szczecin
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