An international patient department needs two different numbers, not one. The workload sets how many coordinators (FTE) you need: monthly coordinator hours divided by the productive hours of one coordinator. Language cover sets a floor: someone who speaks the language must be on duty in every hour in which inquiries arrive, however small the workload. With the example numbers pre-filled here (800 inquiries and 120 treated cases a month from six source-market groups, Monday-to-Friday shifts of 8 hours), the workload needs 10.3 FTE and the roster has 11.0, yet covering every inquiry hour in four languages takes 11.7 FTE, and 34% of the Arabic inquiries still arrive when nobody speaking Arabic is on duty. At $2,000 per coordinator a month the unit costs $28,820 and breaks even at 38 treated cases a month. The pre-filled values are round placeholders, not market data: replace them with your own.
Tool
The planner is at the top of this page as a duty roster. Rows are the languages your unit answers in, columns are the 24 hours of your hospital clock, and every cell is covered, thin or uncovered (hatched). Put people on shifts A, B and C with the + and − buttons, pick a day, and read the board. Beside it a gauge compares the coordinators the workload needs with the coordinators on your roster and with the number it would take to cover every inquiry hour; below it you enter what arrives, how long each stage takes and what the unit costs. A time-zone helper, growth steps and a readiness checklist follow. Nothing is posted; changed values are written into the page link.
An international patient unit (also called an international patient department, office or centre) is the team in a hospital that looks after patients who come from abroad, from the first inquiry to aftercare. It answers inquiries from patients and from agencies in the patient’s language, turns medical records into a treatment quotation with the clinical team, arranges documents, transfers and accommodation, supports the patient during the stay, interprets, and follows up after discharge. Most of this is done by patient coordinators; interpreting in consultations is a separate task, covered below.
In Türkiye the unit is written into the regulation. Article 7 of the Regulation on International Health Tourism and the Health of the Tourist (Official Gazette of 26 April 2025, No. 32882) says a health facility sets up an international health tourism unit for admission, registration, diagnosis, treatment, billing, discharge, interpreting and the coordination of work with intermediary organisations (Article 7(1)). At least one employee of the unit must speak a foreign language and be able to document it (7(2)); the unit’s staff are reported to the provincial or district health directorate through EKİP (7(3)); and one unit employee is named the responsible staff member for each international health tourist and recorded on the Portal (7(4)). Article 7 sets no staffing ratio, so how many coordinators the unit needs is for the hospital to work out, which is what this planner does. The wider rules are in the authorization certificate guide.
The same regulation holds the agency side to a round-the-clock standard for calls: Article 6(2)(b) obliges an intermediary organisation to be able to answer incoming calls in at least two foreign languages, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or to contract a call centre that can. That article does not bind a hospital unit, so how many hours of the week your unit is staffed in each language is a business choice, and this planner prices it.
Seven steps, in the order the work comes:
The example roster has 3.0 FTE in English, 3.0 in Arabic, 3.0 in Russian and 2.0 in German, against a workload of 3.1, 3.1, 2.6 and 1.5 FTE. It carries the workload with 0.7 FTE to spare (6.7%), and still 34% of the Arabic inquiries arrive when nobody speaking Arabic is on duty (31 of 91 inquiry hours a week), because Saturday and Sunday are empty and the last Arabic shift ends before the window closes. Seven-day cover with the same shifts brings that share to 8% and the roster to 15.4 FTE.
There is no honest ratio to copy. How long a first reply, a quote or a day of on-site support takes depends on your treatments, your records, your systems and your languages, and we know of no published staffing ratio for international patient units that we could cite. Measure your own:
Inquirers write in their own daytime, which is a different hour on your clock. The planner converts with UTC offsets: hospital clock = inquirer’s clock − the inquirer’s offset + the hospital’s offset. With the example window of 09:00 to 22:00 local time and a hospital at UTC+3, Gulf inquirers (UAE, UTC+4) arrive 08:00–21:00, Russian ones 09:00–22:00, German ones (UTC+1 in winter) 11:00–00:00, Indian ones (UTC+5:30) 06:30–19:30 and US Eastern ones (UTC−5) 17:00–06:00, where +1 means the next day. The same set of markets is a daytime desk in Arabic and an evening-to-night desk in English.
Daylight saving changes the gap twice a year. Türkiye has stayed on UTC+3 all year since 7 September 2016 (IANA time zone database). The European Union’s rule, Directive 2000/84/EC, puts clocks one hour forward from 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March to 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of October; the United States (15 U.S.C. § 260a) does so from 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March to 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November; Egypt has done so since 2023 from the last Friday of April to the last Thursday of October. Russia (Moscow), Kazakhstan, the Gulf states, India, Brazil and Mexico (Mexico City) have no daylight saving time. For a hospital in Türkiye that makes Germany 2 hours behind in winter and 1 hour behind in summer, and New York 8 hours behind in winter and 7 in summer.
Europe and the United States do not change on the same dates. Between the second and the last Sunday of March, and between the last Sunday of October and the first Sunday of November, the United States is on summer time while Europe is on winter time, so a hospital that follows the EU rule sees its US gap one hour smaller than in either regular season. For a hospital in Türkiye the German gap changes on the EU dates and the US gap on the US dates. The planner’s season switch moves every market that observes daylight saving at once, so check the transition weeks by hand.
Offsets and rules follow release 2026e of the IANA time zone database (29 September 2026). The planner opens in standard (winter) time; switch to summer in the roster settings to see the shift. If your market is not listed, look up its offset in the database and choose the listed zone with the same offset and rule. Countries that span several zones (the United States, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia) need the right city.
Workload and language cover are different numbers. The workload says how many coordinator hours the month contains. Cover says whether, in each hour that inquiries arrive, someone who speaks that language is on duty. A language with 40 inquiries a month needs far less than one full-time coordinator by workload, yet an Arabic-speaking inquirer who writes at 20:00 gets no answer if the only Arabic speaker went home at 17:00. The planner shows both: the gauge compares FTE needed, FTE planned and the cover floor, which is the FTE it takes to have the minimum number of people you set on duty in every hour of the week that has demand.
In the example the workload needs 10.3 FTE but covering every inquiry hour takes 11.7 FTE, and seven-day cover with the same shifts costs 15.4 FTE. Where the two diverge, the gap is a choice you price: staggered shifts, a bilingual coordinator who answers in two languages, a promised reply time for inquiries that arrive out of hours, or interpreters on call. The planner counts each person once, in the row where you place them.
Shifts, nights and weekends are bound by the labour law where the staff work. The planner does not check a roster against it; these are the limits your HR team and counsel will apply:
Two things follow for the board. A shift that runs past midnight belongs to the day it starts on, so a Friday evening shift covers the first hours of Saturday. And weekend cover is expensive by arithmetic, not by policy: one desk open seven days takes 56 rostered hours a week, 1.4 FTE at 40 contract hours, against 40 hours for five days. The planner’s default of 40 contract hours is a placeholder; Türkiye’s Labour Law caps normal working time at 45 hours.
Interpreting in a consultation, a consent conversation or a discharge talk is a different task from coordinating a case, and a coordinator who speaks the language is not automatically a medical interpreter. The planner therefore counts it on its own line: every treated case in a language nobody on your roster speaks is counted as interpreted in full, and cases in languages you do staff are counted at the share you enter. With the example values (30% of the cases in staffed languages, 4 interpreter hours per case at $30 an hour) the unit needs 144 interpreter hours for 36 cases, $4,320 a month. Take a language off the roster and its cases move to the interpreter line.
The unit’s monthly cost is the roster’s FTE times the employer cost of one coordinator (salary and social charges, which you enter), plus interpreter hours at their rate, plus overhead such as software, phone and messaging lines, training and space. With the example numbers: $22,000 for 11.0 FTE at $2,000, $4,320 for interpreters and $2,500 overhead, so $28,820 a month, or $240 per treated case.
Break-even compares that cost with what the unit’s cases contribute. At $3,000 revenue per treated case and 25% left after the direct cost of treatment, a case contributes $750, so the unit pays for itself at 38 treated cases a month — about 256 inquiries, 32% of the example volume — and the 120 expected cases contribute $90,000, $61,180 net. All of these are placeholders; the revenue, the share and the salaries are yours to enter. For the economics of a single case use the case economics calculator, for the price a patient is quoted the package price calculator, and for the cost of winning the inquiry in the first place the patient acquisition cost calculator.
When is the next hire due? Hours rise with inquiries, so the example roster, which carries the workload with 0.7 FTE to spare, is full at about 854 inquiries a month, 6.7% more than today. One more coordinator costs $2,000 a month, lifts that point to about 931 inquiries (12.0 FTE, $31,529 a month at that volume) and needs about 2.7 more treated cases a month to pay for itself. To plan a single patient’s stay day by day, use the case timeline planner.
Twenty prompts in five areas sit at the bottom of the planner; tick what is already settled in writing in your unit. Roles: one named owner for triage of every new inquiry and a named deputy; a duty manager for every shift, including weekends and public holidays; a named contact in each clinical department who answers coordinators within an agreed time; a written split of who interprets, who coordinates and who bills. Service levels: a written first-reply target per channel (form, e-mail, messaging app, phone) counted in the inquirer’s local hours; a written target for sending a quote once complete medical records arrive; a rule for inquiries that arrive outside staffed hours (auto-reply text, promised reply time, next-shift handover); a monthly report of reply times by language. Escalation: a named on-call phone for patients and agencies out of hours; a written path for a clinical complaint or complication reported by a patient who has gone home; a rule for who may promise a price, a date or an exception; a named deputy for every role when someone is on leave or sick. Data handling: a rule for which messaging apps and e-mail accounts may carry patient data and where the records live; consent wording for health data and for sharing it with agencies and partners, kept with the case; access to patient records limited by role, with a log of who opened what; a written route for transferring patient data across borders, checked with your data protection officer. Aftercare ownership: a named owner for aftercare questions after discharge and the hours that person answers in; a follow-up schedule per treatment type, set with the clinical team; a hand-over of records and instructions to the patient’s home doctor in the patient’s language; a record of aftercare questions and complications, reviewed with the clinical team. It is a prompt list, not an audit and not legal advice.
Health onMESSE is an online trade fair for health tourism where hospitals, clinics, hotels and other providers exhibit and agencies meet them. Agencies join free: there is no stand fee and no subscription. For a hospital with an international patient unit, the languages you cover, the hours you answer in and your reply times are facts you can show on your profile and discuss in meetings. Pair this planner with the clinic contract checklist for the terms agencies will ask about, and browse the Health onMESSE tools directory.
Hospital or clinic with an international patient unit? Exhibit at Health onMESSE to put your languages, hours and reply times in front of agencies, or see what exhibitors get.
Agencies join Health onMESSE free: no stand fee, no subscription. Join as an agency to browse hospital and clinic profiles and request meetings, or read what agencies get.
More planning tools for this fair are in the Health onMESSE tools directory, and the fair itself is at Health onMESSE.
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