About us

Two families of medicine, one bridge between them.

Latitude 19 exists because our founder stands in both worlds: trained and practised in the NHS, born to a family from Hainan. What began as arranging assessments for friends became a conviction — that the medicine now licensed in the Lecheng zone deserved a bridge Western patients could trust.

What we are — and are not

We are a facilitator, not a hospital. Your care is delivered by licensed providers in the Lecheng zone; our job is to choose them well, arrange everything around them, and hand you back to your GP with a complete record.

That means we carry no clinical conflict of interest: we are not selling you our own procedures. Our only product is judgement — which providers to trust, and how to make the week around them effortless.

Our founding physician
The founder

An NHS doctor with family on the island

Our founding physician trained and practised in the NHS, and brings that training to a single task: appraising the Lecheng zone's providers the way a British doctor would — case volumes, complication rates, equipment, the seniority of who actually sees you.

Fluent in English and Mandarin, they sit in on consultations where clients want them to, translate not just language but clinical culture, and write the debrief you take home in the plain English your GP expects.

The other half of the operation is family — literally. Our people on the ground in Hainan have managed hospital and hotel relationships there for years. When your transfer waits outside the terminal and your consultant is expecting you by name, that is why.

The standard

“I hold every provider to the standard I would expect for my own family — most of whom live on the island.”

The Zone

Boao Lecheng: a deliberate exception

In 2013 China's State Council designated one place — a stretch of Hainan's east coast — as the country's only pilot zone for international medicine. Treatments, devices and medicines approved abroad can be used there before anywhere else in China, under national regulation. The result is a concentration of internationally-run hospitals unlike anywhere else in the country.

464
treatments licensed for international patients — many unavailable elsewhere in China, some unavailable in the UK or US
413,700
patient visits in 2024 — a functioning destination, not an experiment
Mayo · Hopkins
institutional affiliations among the zone's providers, alongside partnerships across Europe and Asia
2013
established by the State Council, with regulation held at national level ever since
Lecheng hospital campus architecture
Hainan east coast — bay and rainforest
How we vet

We decline more than we accept

Every provider we work with has passed the same appraisal, in person, by our founding physician. It is the whole reason to use us.

I
Licence & regulation
Zone licence verified, inspection history reviewed, scope of licensed treatments confirmed against what is offered.
II
Clinical appraisal in person
Case volumes, equipment, protocols, and — above all — the seniority and English of the clinicians who will actually see you.
III
The patient's week
We walk the journey ourselves: admissions, waiting times, privacy, food, how results are explained. If it isn't calm, it isn't listed.
IV
Reviewed continuously
Our family on the ground is in these hospitals weekly. A provider that slips is removed — it has happened, and it will happen again.

See the programmes — prices included.

Three set weeks, published prices, everything arranged. Or answer eight questions and we'll compose one around you.

View programmes Build your own