(Asan Medical Center)

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Last year, in January, Dr. Mohammed Al-Otaibi from Saudi Arabia came to Asan Medical Center in Seoul for advanced training. He spends nearly all day in the operating room, mastering techniques that are rarely available in his home country—from small-graft liver transplantation to robotic surgery for pancreatic and liver cancers, and vascular resections for advanced pancreatic cancer. Drawing on his experience at this world-leading institution, he said, “I want to bring robotic surgery to my home country and lead the expansion of living-donor liver transplantation.”

Over the past decade, Asan Medical Center has treated some 35,000 severely ill patients from the Middle East and trained around 600 medical professionals from the region, reinforcing Korea’s K-medical footprint in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The GCC refers to a regional cooperation body made up of six countries: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain.

Since 2014, Asan Medical Center has signed physician-training agreements with GCC-region governments and institutions, according to the hospital on Thursday. As a result, from 2015 to September this year, 478 Saudi doctors, 50 from Oman, 31 from Kuwait, 30 from the UAE, 8 from Qatar and 2 from Bahrain—around 600 in total—have come to Seoul to learn highly challenging procedures including liver and kidney transplantation, microsurgical reconstruction, robotic hepatobiliary-pancreatic surgery, and intra-uterine endoscopy.

(Asan Medical Center)

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In parallel, the hospital has directly sent its medical teams abroad: In 2016, Professor Lee Sung-gyu performed Qatar’s first adult live-donor liver transplantation; in 2023, Professors Chung Ki-wook and Sung Tae-yon led laparoscopic retroperitoneal adrenalectomy and trans-axillary laparoscopic thyroidectomy in Kuwait.

Over the past 10 years, patients from the UAE (22,445), Saudi Arabia (9,440), Kuwait (1,551), Qatar (889), Oman (739) and Bahrain (81) have visited Asan Medical Center for treatment. In total, more than 35,000 patients from the GCC region have received care at the hospital, most of them suffering from serious conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease or requiring organ transplantation.

On the system side, Asan Medical Center is exporting its model: It is building the first integrated gastroenterology specialty hospital in the GCC, tentatively named the “Asan GI Hospital-UAE”, with construction started in July last year and an opening target of 2026. This will provide high-quality access for patients who previously had to travel abroad for care in areas such as digestive cancer, liver transplant follow-up, and bariatric surgery.

Building on these efforts, Asan Medical Center has strengthened its standing as a global medical institution. In the 2025 World’s Best Hospitals ranking released by Newsweek, the South Korean hospital placed 25th worldwide, the highest among all Korean medical institutions. In the 2026 World’s Best Specialized Hospitals evaluation, six departments—oncology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, neurology, urology and orthopedics—were all ranked within the global top 10.

“Treating complex international patients and training overseas medical professionals is a key mission for the hospital. We will continue to disseminate our advanced medical technologies and systems globally, strengthening our role as a global hospital,” said Asan Medical Center President Park Seung-Il.