Hospitals in Bangkok

Hospitals in Bangkok

Our directory holds 68 hospitals inside Bangkok: places that admit patients, as distinct from the clinics, dental practices, eye-surgery centres, fertility centres and rehabilitation practices that make up most of the health category and are listed separately.

The count is deliberately narrow in one more way. Large hospitals here file their departments and buildings as separate entries - a cardiology centre, a screening centre, a specific floor of a specific tower - and one group alone accounts for eleven of them. Those are not separate hospitals and are not on this page.

46 of the 68 are labelled private and 3 public. Five are university hospitals or medical faculties, and the remaining 14 carry a generic label that says nothing about ownership. Seven of the 68 are single-specialty by name: four eye hospitals, two dermatology hospitals and a children's hospital.

Where they are

The distribution is unusually flat. 68 hospitals sit across 36 of Bangkok's districts, and no district holds more than 6. Watthana and Huai Khwang have 6 each, Bang Rak and Ratchathewi 4 each - the four together are 29 percent of the page. On our gyms page the top three districts alone carry 41 percent.

That is the point worth taking from this page. Hospitals track population and available land, not the Sukhumvit corridor, so some of the largest and most-reviewed hospitals in the city sit well outside the centre, in Min Buri, Bang Kapi, Bang Khun Thian, Bang Bon and Sai Mai. If you are choosing on the assumption that the good hospitals are downtown, the data does not support it.

What the ratings say

All 68 carry a public rating and 67 carry a review count, which makes this one of the better-measured pages on the site: the median hospital has 1,109 reviews and 35 of the 68 have more than a thousand. The busiest has over 20,000.

The ratings themselves are the widest spread we publish. The median is 4.25, 22 sit at 4.5 or above, but 23 sit below 4.0 and 4 below 3.0. All three public hospitals are in that bottom group.

That spread is about access, not about medicine. Subsidised state hospitals absorb enormous volume, and reviews of them describe waiting, crowding and paperwork. Private hospitals are rated on comfort, speed and communication, which are easier to do well. Neither number tells you anything about a surgeon or an outcome. Use the ratings to set expectations for the visit and nothing further.

Groups and single sites

Several groups run multiple Bangkok hospitals, and the naming makes them easy to spot: the largest has 5 hospitals on this page and the next has 4. A group branch generally means consistent admissions process, international-patient desk and billing across sites, and often a shared medical-records system between them, which matters if you move between branches.

The rest are single-site. That is where the range is widest, in both directions - a specialist hospital with a national reputation in one field and a small general hospital serving one district both sit in that group.

What is on a listing

Every one of the 68 has a phone number and opening hours on file, and 66 have a website. Hours are worth reading rather than assuming: most hospitals here run a 24-hour emergency department alongside outpatient clinics that keep normal daytime hours, and the listing hours usually describe the latter.

What we do not hold is most of what decides the choice: prices, package rates, which insurers are in network, direct-billing arrangements, accreditation, doctor lists, languages spoken, bed counts and waiting times. None of that is in our data and we do not estimate it.

How to use this page

• Sort out insurance before you need it. Whether a hospital bills your insurer directly, or you pay and claim back, is the single largest practical difference between two hospitals of the same quality. Confirm it with the insurer, not with the hospital's website.
• Know your nearest emergency department, not your favourite hospital. In an emergency the traffic decides, not the brand. Find the closest hospital with a 24-hour ED to where you live and where you work, and save both.
• Ask for a written estimate before anything planned. Private hospitals here will give one, and for the same procedure the range across this list is very large.
• Read the low ratings for the pattern. With 23 hospitals below 4.0, the ratings on this page do separate venues - but they separate them on queueing and billing, which may or may not be what you are optimising for.
• Check the department, not just the hospital. A hospital with a strong reputation in one specialty is not automatically strong in another, and our data does not carry departmental detail at all.

This page is a directory, not medical advice. Ratings and review counts on each listing come from public listing data and reflect what visitors reported. We do not verify or adjust them.