Two systems on one island
Phuket has two kinds of hospital and they are priced, staffed and used differently. The private hospitals — Bangkok Hospital Phuket (普吉镇), Bangkok Hospital Siriroj (普吉镇), Dibuk Hospital (查龙), Mission Hospital Phuket (普吉镇) — are companies: they charge private rates, they employ interpreters, they run international patient desks that deal with foreign insurers, and their emergency rooms are where an ambulance from a resort usually goes. Two of them hold Joint Commission International accreditation, the hospital standard most foreign insurers recognise: Bangkok Hospital Phuket, Bangkok Hospital Siriroj. The public hospitals — Chalong Hospital (查龙), Patong Hospital (芭东), Thalang Hospital (邦涛), Vachira Phuket Hospital (普吉镇) — belong to the Ministry of Public Health. Vachira Phuket Hospital is the largest institution on the island with 650 beds and takes the cases the district hospitals cannot; 芭东, Thalang and 查龙 are district hospitals that stabilise, treat the routine and refer the rest into town.
Foreigners can use both. A public hospital bills a foreign patient under the ministry's fee schedule for non-Thai nationals, which is above what a Thai citizen pays and well below private-hospital rates; the trade-off is queues, wards rather than rooms and Thai as the working language, with English available at the front desk and in the emergency room but not guaranteed on the ward. A private hospital bills a private tariff, asks for a passport and either an insurance guarantee or a deposit before admission, and speaks to you in your own language. For a cut that needs stitches, a scooter graze or a fever, either system works; for anything that needs a night in a bed, most visitors with insurance end up in a private hospital, and most long-stayers without it learn where Vachira's outpatient building is.
In an emergency: 1669
The nationwide medical emergency number is 1669, run by the National Institute for Emergency Medicine; it is free, answered around the clock and dispatches the nearest available ambulance, which on Phuket may be a public hospital's, a rescue foundation's or a private hospital's. English is spoken by some operators but not all; give the location first — the name of the resort or the road and the nearest landmark — and keep the line open. The tourist police, 1155, answer in English and can relay. Private hospitals also run their own ambulance lines, listed on each hospital page in this catalogue, and a resort's front desk will usually call the private hospital it has an arrangement with. 8 of the 8 hospitals here run a 24-hour emergency room.
Distance matters more than it looks on a map. From 芭东 the nearest 24-hour emergency room, Patong Hospital, is 0.5 km away; from 迈考 it is 14.6 km to Thalang Hospital, about 40 minutes on the site's indicative model and longer on a wet-season evening. The hill road between 芭东 and the east side, the bypass around 普吉镇 and the single road up the west coast are the three places where a twenty-minute drive becomes forty. The nearest-hospital table on this page is straight-line distance from the area centre with a stated driving model (1.4 × the straight line at 30 km/h); it is there to show which hospital is nearest, not to promise a time.
Insurance, direct billing and deposits
Direct billing means the hospital invoices the insurer instead of the patient. 3 of the 8 hospitals here list direct-billing arrangements with foreign insurers: Bangkok Hospital Phuket, Bangkok Hospital Siriroj, Dibuk Hospital. In practice it works for admissions: the international desk sends the diagnosis and an estimate to the insurer, waits for a guarantee of payment — a few hours for a big insurer with a local office, a day or more for a small one in another time zone — and then bills the insurer at discharge, less any excess. Outpatient visits are usually paid at the counter and claimed back with the itemised receipt and a medical certificate, which every hospital here issues in English on request. Without insurance or a guarantee, a private hospital asks for a deposit on admission; public hospitals admit first and bill at discharge, and will hold a passport or ask for a guarantor rather than refuse a patient.
Travel insurance for Thailand is not compulsory for tourist entry, but several long-stay visa categories require health cover, and the retirement extension has a minimum cover written into the rule. Whatever the policy, three things decide whether a Phuket claim goes smoothly: the policy number and the insurer's emergency line in the phone before the trip, a passport at the hospital, and a call to the insurer before any non-emergency admission, because most policies require pre-authorisation for an inpatient stay.
Diving accidents and the hyperbaric chamber
Phuket is a diving base — Racha, the King Cruiser wreck, Similan liveaboards from the north — and decompression illness is the one emergency for which the nearest hospital is not the right hospital. Treatment is recompression in a hyperbaric chamber, and 2 institutions in this catalogue operate one: Bangkok Hospital Phuket, Bangkok Hospital Siriroj. A diver with joint pain, numbness, unusual fatigue or confusion after a dive should be put on oxygen and taken there, or 1669 should be told it is a diving accident so the ambulance goes to the chamber rather than the nearest district hospital. Dive insurance matters here because chamber treatment is billed by the session and is the most expensive routine claim a Phuket tourist can make; ordinary travel policies often exclude diving below a stated depth.
Dengue season and what the test costs
Dengue is the illness a Phuket visitor is most likely to need a hospital for. It is mosquito-borne, transmission rises with the rain — May to October on the island's calendar, with a tail into November — and the day-biting Aedes mosquito lives in towns and resorts, not only in the jungle. The symptoms are a sudden high fever, a headache behind the eyes, joint and muscle pain and sometimes a rash from about the third day; the warning signs that turn it into an emergency are persistent vomiting, abdominal pain, bleeding gums or any bleeding, and a fever that drops while the patient gets worse. There is no home test: the diagnosis is a blood test, the NS1 antigen in the first days and IgM/IgG antibodies afterwards, plus a platelet count. No dated anchor for the test is on file yet. A confirmed case with falling platelets is usually admitted for fluids and monitoring; a private room in a private hospital was 2,000–6,200 THB (≈ $61–188) across 3 hospitals, against 1,800–6,000 THB (≈ $55–182) across 2 hospitals in the public system — and a dengue admission is typically three to five nights, which is why the insurance section above matters.
How to read the price anchors
The figures on these pages are anchors, not an index. Each one is a single published or reported number with its own date and source: a hospital's outpatient fee page or a package price counts as published; a dated bill quoted by an insurer, a broker or a patient counts as reported and is labelled so. They are not medians of a sample, they are not averaged across hospitals, and nothing is estimated where a source is missing — a hospital without a dated figure shows a dash. Across the private hospitals a doctor's consultation was 800–2,000 THB (≈ $24–61) across 2 hospitals; 200–300 THB (≈ $6–9) across 1 hospital in the public system. A minor-injury ER visit — cleaning, stitches, dressing, a tetanus booster — was 300–800 THB (≈ $9–24) across 1 hospital; an IV drip with a few hours' observation for dehydration or food poisoning was 6,700 THB (≈ $203) across 1 hospital.
The dollar column converts each baht figure at the exchange rate on file (32.98 THB per US dollar on 2026年9月3日, ECB reference rate) and is there for orientation; the hospital bills in baht. Anchors are dated between 2023年7月28日 and 2026年9月5日, and a figure is replaced only when a newer dated source is found, never inflated forward. The whole catalogue, with the source URL behind every row, is published as JSON under CC BY 4.0 for anyone who wants to check a figure at its origin.
Coverage and what is not here
This revision (2026年9月5日) lists 8 institutions: every hospital on the island with a 24-hour emergency room plus the private hospitals a tourist is likely to be sent to. It does not list the hundreds of private clinics, dental practices and pharmacies — a pharmacist in any resort town will sell most non-controlled medicines over the counter and point to the nearest clinic — nor the clinics inside resorts, which are a hotel service rather than a hospital. Languages are those the hospital itself lists (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic across the catalogue, beyond Thai); an interpreter for a rarer language is arranged on request at the private hospitals and by phone at the public ones. Nothing on this page is medical advice: it says where the hospitals are, what they charged when last checked and how the system works, and for anything else the answer is the nearest 24-hour emergency room or 1669.