The decision to have surgery abroad rarely begins with a plane ticket. More often, it begins at a kitchen table late in the evening, with a laptop open, a referral letter that raised more questions than it answered, and a waiting list measured in months rather than weeks. For a growing number of patients in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and beyond, that late-night search now leads somewhere they might not have expected a decade ago: Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second city and one of Central and Eastern Europe’s most dynamic university, medical and IT hubs.
What does that journey actually look like, hour by hour and step by step? To find out, we traced the typical path of an international patient travelling to Cluj-Napoca for robotic or laparoscopic surgery with Professor Florin Graur, MD, PhD — a general surgeon and Professor of Surgery with nearly three decades of operative experience and more than 10,000 procedures performed as primary surgeon. The result is less a leap into the unknown than a carefully sequenced process, most of which happens before the patient ever boards a plane.
Step One: The First Email
Every journey in this story starts the same way: a written enquiry. The patient — let us call her a fifty-something teacher from Manchester with a symptomatic gallbladder, though she could just as easily be a Dutch engineer with a recurrent hernia or a German retiree facing colorectal cancer surgery — sends a short message describing her diagnosis and attaches whatever she has: scan reports, blood work, a discharge summary from a previous admission.
Because Professor Graur’s team works in English, nothing is lost in translation at this stage. The documents are reviewed, clarifying questions come back within days, and the patient receives an honest first assessment: whether her case falls within the practice’s core areas — oncological surgery of the colon, stomach and liver, hepato-pancreato-biliary conditions, bariatric and metabolic surgery, abdominal wall and hernia repair, anti-reflux surgery for GERD, or gallbladder disease — and whether she appears, on paper, to be a candidate for a minimally invasive approach.
Step Two: The Video Consultation
The pivotal moment comes next: a scheduled video consultation with the surgeon himself. This is not a sales call. It is a clinical conversation in which the patient walks through her history, shares her imaging on screen, and hears — in plain English — what the operation would involve, what the realistic alternatives are, and what recovery typically looks like. Patients researching this route can review the step-by-step process for international patients in advance, which helps them arrive at the video call with the right documents and the right questions.
For many patients, this consultation is what converts an abstract idea into a concrete plan. They are no longer reading about a surgeon; they are talking to one — a clinician who holds two European board fellowships, in Minimally Invasive Surgery (F.E.B.S./MIS) and in Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Surgery (F.E.B.S./HPB), and who has published more than 120 scientific papers in his field. If surgery is appropriate, the call ends with a provisional plan: the recommended procedure, the pre-operative tests still needed, and a proposed timeframe.
Step Three: Planning the Trip
Here the journey diverges pleasantly from what many Western European patients have come to expect at home. There are no waiting lists of the kind familiar across much of Western Europe; scheduling is a matter of coordinating calendars, not surviving a queue. The team proposes dates, explains how many nights the patient should plan to stay in Cluj-Napoca, and outlines the practical details in writing.
The logistics are simpler than most patients anticipate:
- Getting there: Cluj-Napoca International Airport has direct flights from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, so most patients travel without connections.
- Paperwork: Romania is a member state of the European Union, which means EU patients travel on familiar terms and are protected by European standards and patient rights.
- Language: the surgical team communicates in English throughout — from the first email to the discharge letter.
- Cost: while every case is quoted individually, treatment costs in Romania are significantly lower than for comparable private care in Western Europe, which is one reason self-paying patients look east in the first place.
Our Manchester teacher books a morning flight, packs her medical file, and lands in Cluj-Napoca in roughly the time it would take her to drive to London.
Step Four: Admission at a Modern Private Hospital
Professor Graur consults and operates at Humanitas Hospital (MedLife) on Strada Frunzișului 75 in Cluj-Napoca — a modern private facility that tends to surprise first-time visitors who arrive with outdated assumptions about the region. Admission day follows a rhythm that will feel familiar to anyone who has been treated privately elsewhere in Europe: check-in, pre-operative assessments, a meeting with the anaesthetist, and a final face-to-face consultation with the surgeon.
That last conversation matters. Video calls establish trust; the bedside visit confirms it. The patient hears the plan once more, this time with the operation scheduled for the following morning, and has a final chance to ask questions. Where clinically useful, Professor Graur can also perform diagnostic ultrasound himself — a competence he trained for at the Jefferson Ultrasound Institute in Philadelphia — which keeps assessment and surgical judgement in the same pair of hands.
Step Five: The Operation and the Days After
The defining feature of the surgery itself is the approach: robotic and laparoscopic techniques wherever the case allows. For patients, the practical meaning of “minimally invasive” is measured in small incisions, and typically in less post-operative pain and an earlier return to normal activity than with open surgery — outcomes that always depend on the individual case, which is precisely why the pre-operative assessment is so thorough.
This is the point in the journey where experience becomes more than a number on a website. A surgeon who has performed over 10,000 procedures, trained during international fellowships in France, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, and remains active in the European surgical community — as a member of the Romanian Society of Surgery, the Romanian Association of Endoscopic Surgery and the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery (EAES), and as a national delegate to the UEMS HPB Surgery Bureau — operates within networks where techniques and standards are continuously compared across borders. International patients are, in effect, treated inside that European conversation, not outside it.
Recovery unfolds on-site over the following days, with the length of stay depending on the procedure: shorter for gallbladder or hernia surgery, longer for major oncological or hepato-pancreato-biliary operations. English-speaking staff handle daily rounds, and family members abroad can be kept informed without a translator in the room.
Step Six: Discharge, the Flight Home and Online Follow-Up
Discharge is not the end of the relationship; it is a change of channel. The patient leaves with an English-language discharge summary, wound care instructions, and a scheduled programme of video follow-up consultations. Sutures can often be removed and histopathology results discussed remotely, and the local GP or specialist back home receives documentation they can actually read. Many patients also continue their own education after returning home, using the practice’s English-language patient guides to understand their recovery milestones, dietary adjustments and warning signs worth reporting.
Our teacher from Manchester flies home a few days after her laparoscopic operation. Two weeks later, she joins a video call from her living room to review her results. The journey that began with a late-night search has ended where it started — at home — but with the operation behind her rather than ahead of her.
A Journey Built on Process, Not Chance
The lesson of this patient journey is that successful treatment abroad is rarely about luck or bargain-hunting. It is about process: written enquiry, video consultation, structured planning, treatment in an accredited modern facility within the EU, and disciplined remote follow-up. Cluj-Napoca offers the infrastructure — direct flights, a modern private hospital, a university city comfortable with international visitors — and surgeons like Professor Graur supply the clinical substance. For patients weighing their options, the sensible first step is neither a flight nor a payment. It is an email, a file of medical records, and a conversation with a specialist.
About: Professor Florin Graur, MD, PhD, is a general surgeon and Professor of Surgery with nearly three decades of experience and more than 10,000 procedures performed as primary surgeon. He holds two European board fellowships — in Minimally Invasive Surgery (F.E.B.S./MIS) and Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Surgery (F.E.B.S./HPB) — has authored over 120 scientific papers, and consults and operates at Humanitas Hospital (MedLife), Str. Frunzișului 75, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
This article is for general information only and does not replace a specialist medical consultation.
