What to do when someone is hospitalised in Thailand
Not sure where to start? Start here
Written by Greg Berryman. Sources last checked 11 August 2026.
Someone is in hospital and cannot speak for themselves. Two things decide how the next few hours go: money, and who is allowed to say yes to treatment.
If the person was here on a visit rather than living here, when someone dies on holiday in Thailand covers the rest of that situation.
Who is going to pay the hospital in Thailand?
Every box with an underlined heading opens the page that explains it.
What do you do first?
- Find the policy. Phone, email, bank, credit card, employer.
- Call the assistance number on it before treatment decisions are made, not after.
- Ask the hospital's international patient department to deal with the assistance company directly. They do this every day.
- Do not sign anything that makes you personally liable for the bill until the insurer has been reached, unless the alternative is treatment not happening.
- Ask the hospital what it needs before it will accept a guarantee of payment instead of a cash deposit.
- Reach the people closest to the patient early, even if you do not know much yet. Their partner or spouse first, then parents or adult children. Some of them may be the only people with any legal standing.
What will a Thai hospital ask for first?
Money, or proof that someone else will pay.
Thai private hospitals expect payment at or before treatment. They do not accept a foreign country's national health cover. For anything that is not an emergency, they normally want one of three things first: a guarantee of payment from an insurer, a policy document the billing desk can check, or cash.
Deposits for admission are widely reported to run into the tens of thousands of baht. That figure comes from hospitals and insurers rather than from any official source, and it moves with the hospital and the treatment. The principle holds either way: somebody will be asked for money before much happens.
Being asked is not the same as owing it. The billing desk asks whoever is standing there, because that is who is standing there. What creates a personal liability is signing something that accepts it, which is why the fourth item above matters. A spouse should not assume the same, since marital property rules can reach further, and that is a question for a Thai lawyer.
Does a Thai hospital treat an emergency without payment?
Yes. A hospital will stabilise someone in front of it, and under the Universal Coverage for Emergency Patients policy a critical emergency patient is treated at the nearest hospital, public or private, without being charged for the first 72 hours, and cannot be turned away.
Most writing about that policy talks about private hospitals, because that is where it changed practice. Public hospitals were already treating emergencies without payment up front. The entitlement itself is to any hospital, and going to the nearest one is the point of it.
Whether that protection reaches a foreign visitor is unsettled. The scheme works by reimbursing the hospital from the Thai health funds the patient belongs to, and a foreign visitor belongs to none of them. Some published guidance says the 72 hours apply whatever the nationality. Other guidance says foreigners sit outside the national scheme and are billed as normal. The question is with a Thai lawyer.
What is not in doubt is the shape of it. Treatment to stabilise happens. The argument about who pays comes afterwards. It is the admission, the surgery and the days on a ward where the billing desk becomes the gate.
Who pays the medical bill if there is no insurance?
The patient does. Not the person standing at the desk, and not the embassy.
Uninsured does not mean unable to pay. A resident with a house, a car and money in the bank is not a charity case, and the reason the bill becomes a problem is not poverty. It is that nobody can reach that money while the person who owns it cannot sign.
The question is how to reach the person entitled to deal with that money.
- A spouse. The first answer, and for a married resident usually the shortest one, because they are in Thailand rather than eight time zones away. A spouse is next of kin, the hospital will deal with them, and they can settle the bill and decide what happens next. Marriage has been open to same-sex couples in Thailand since 23 January 2025.
- An unmarried partner. Not next of kin, and no amount of time together changes that. But they are usually the person who knows where the policy is, which cards exist and who to call, and they can reach the family faster than anyone else in the building. See what happens to your partner.
- The patient's own cards and cash. What is in their wallet. Not their Thai bank account, which nobody can operate while they cannot sign, for the reasons on power of attorney in Thailand.
- Parents or adult children. A hospital's international department will take a card payment over the phone or a bank transfer from abroad.
- The embassy, within narrow limits. It will help trace and contact next of kin and explain how funds are transferred, and the British service will move money on a person's behalf for a fee. No embassy pays a medical bill, lends money or guarantees payment, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office says plainly that it is not funded to give emergency financial help.
Government hospitals cost a great deal less than private ones, and a move to one is sometimes raised. That is a decision for the patient, or for next of kin if the patient cannot speak. It is not something a visitor can agree to and not something a visitor should be proposing, whatever the bill looks like. Where someone is treated is not a budgeting exercise carried out by whoever happens to be in the corridor.
What is a guarantee of payment?
It is the insurer telling the hospital directly that it will pay, so the person standing at the desk does not have to.
It comes from the insurer's assistance company, not from the ordinary claims line and not from the hospital. Travel and expatriate policies normally carry a 24-hour assistance number, and that is the number that matters at three in the morning.
Call it before treatment rather than after, if there is any choice at all. Direct billing has to be set up, it does not just happen. And most policies say the insurer has to agree the cost in advance, so pay first and you may not get it back.
Where do you find their insurance policy?
Usually in an email, on the phone of the person who cannot now unlock it.
Try the bank, the credit card and the employer as well. Travel cover is often attached to a card or an account rather than bought separately.
What does medical evacuation cover in Thailand?
Transport to the nearest hospital that can treat the patient.
Evacuation cover is normally written as the nearest suitable hospital. In practice that often means a transfer from an island or a provincial hospital to Bangkok or Phuket. It does not mean a flight home.
It normally has to be approved in advance by the assistance company, and their doctors decide on medical grounds rather than on what the family wants. A flight home, if it happens at all, tends to come later and only once the patient is fit to fly.
Those are the usual terms rather than a rule. The policy in front of you is what counts.
Does travel insurance cover a motorbike accident in Thailand?
Often not, and this is the exclusion that catches people here.
Riding a motorbike is one of the most commonly restricted or excluded items in travel policies. If it is covered at all, cover usually depends on holding the right licence for that machine, and sometimes on wearing a helmet.
Worth checking now, while nothing has happened. A rider without the right licence may be uninsured for exactly the accident they are most likely to have. Drink is the other common exclusion, and it is applied strictly.
Both points come from insurers' own policy wordings and vary between policies. Read yours.
Who can consent to treatment for someone who cannot?
It depends on whether the patient can still decide, and on who is standing there.
A spouse counts as next of kin. Governments also generally recognise a parent and an adult child, though each defines the term differently and several publish no definition at all. Who counts, and for which government, is set out on who can legally act.
An unmarried partner is on none of those lists, however long you have been together. Thai hospitals' published patient rights talk about a legal representative acting for a patient who cannot act, and a partner with no court appointment is not one.
Thailand has no power of attorney that survives incapacity. An ordinary one stops working at the moment it would be needed. The only route to legal authority is a court appointment, and that takes two applications and months rather than hours. See power of attorney and guardianship and curatorship.
Whether a medical proxy you draft yourself carries any weight in a Thai hospital is unresolved.
What can the embassy do about a hospital bill?
Nothing financial.
Consular staff can contact next of kin, can confirm to a hospital that the patient is one of their nationals, and can explain how money is transferred from abroad. They will not pay a medical bill, guarantee a payment, arrange an evacuation or make a treatment decision. The insurer's assistance company does those things, or nobody does.
The embassy numbers are on what to do when someone dies in Thailand.
What keeps running while someone is in hospital?
Everything, and that is the difference between this and a death.
Rent, utilities, insurance premiums, a lease, a phone contract, a visa extension, a bank account nobody can operate. A death eventually produces a process. This produces a person who is alive, whose bills keep arriving, and for whom no document signed in advance puts anyone in charge.
The full picture is on what changes if you lose capacity.
What if the patient does not survive?
The sequence changes completely, and it changes immediately.
A hospital death means the hospital notifies the police and may deal with the district office, and the question becomes who can collect the body rather than who can consent to treatment. Start with what to do when someone dies in Thailand.
One thing carries over. The bill does not disappear, and the patient's own money is further out of reach, because a Thai court has to appoint an estate administrator before anyone can touch it. See the court order that unfreezes a Thai bank account.
What is in the guide?
This page covers the emergency. The guide covers what has to exist before it: an asset and document inventory recording where the policy is and what it covers, a record of who should be contacted and in what order, and the questions to put to a Thai lawyer about the authority nobody has until a court grants it.
Sources
- National Health Security Office, on the Universal Coverage for Emergency Patients policy introduced in 2017, under which a critical emergency patient is treated at the nearest hospital for the first 72 hours without service fees. The scheme reimburses hospitals from the Thai health coverage schemes the patient belongs to. Whether it protects a foreign visitor who belongs to none of them is reported both ways in secondary guidance and is not settled here.
- Support for British nationals abroad, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, for what a consular service will and will not do: information about transferring funds, a charge for transferring money on a person's behalf, and no funding for emergency financial assistance.
- Thai hospitals' published patient-rights documents are the source for a legal representative acting for a patient who cannot act.
- The payment practices, deposit levels, evacuation terms and policy exclusions described here are drawn from hospital and insurer published material rather than from any government source. They vary between hospitals and between policies and are stated here as reported.
- The Thai law described on this page, the absence of a power of attorney that survives incapacity and the court route to guardianship, is cited by section on power of attorney and guardianship. No official English text of Thai legislation exists, and only the Thai text as published in the Royal Gazette has legal force. Thai legal review is under way.