Which Thai visa is best for working, volunteering, and potentially retiring?

SharpBlueberry6807 I hope your comment wasn’t written with too much entitlement.

Thailand generally isn’t looking for immigrant health care workers. If you want to work, there are avenues to do so if you aren’t prepared yet to retire. LTR has a specific category for it. Or you can easily retire here with wealthy pensioner LTR. If you want a work visa, you will need to find a medical facility willing to take you on first. Best of luck with the decision

SharpBlueberry6807 I'm approaching 80, so I'm no stranger to hospitals! As you infer, there is no visa that covers what you would like to do. Have you looked at the various Thai Elite programs? I'm not familiar with their latest packages, but other than crazy expensive, relatively hassle free. You still can't work with the visa it covers though.

SharpBlueberry6807 no

SharpBlueberry6807 a private hospital would be a better bet. The government hospitals are really not good, have poorly trained staff and honestly many doctors that don’t seem to care. I am, at this very moment, in a government hospital (in a small town) with a 9 year old child who has thalassemia and is transfusion dependent. He is currently receiving his fourth unit of blood in three months. His Hg only goes slightly over ten after he receives blood and will go down to 8.0 within a few weeks. If he gets sick with a lung infection, his Hg goes down the upper 6s to 7.? I sometime have to take him to a different hospital to see a pediatrician. I have copies of all of his bloodwork. There is not a single doctor at this hospital willing to look at them so they can see the same trend. He has a cough and a fever of 39. His spleen is and has been enlarged. The doctor listened to his lungs in one spot on the upper left side and said he wasn’t wheezing so just keep him on fever meds and take him home. I asked if he would order a CBC. He asked me why would we do that. I repeated that his Hg goes down every time he has a fever. If he knew anything about medicine he would know that a fever accelerates rbc destruction and this kid’s rbcs only live for about two weeks as it is. His urine is the color of coke. The dr finally agreed to the CBC. Hg is 7.6. And STILL this guy had to call the pediatrician to ask what to do!! This 9 year old boy who o ly weighs 15 kgs deserves a chance at life but it is a constant struggle for me to get him help. You would face this same sort of thing if you worked at a government hospital. Private hospitals are great. In larger cities that have a lot of expats, you would be an asset. My understanding is that volunteer visas only last 90 days. The boy lives at an orphanage. I help out there. If you do decide to volunteer anywhere feel free to visit here.

SharpBlueberry6807 First of all I am trying not to be excessively negative here.Also my experience is based on working with Thai employers that were not hospitals, although I have Thai in laws that do.

Also I am assuming that you are not a physician. If you are, then the landscape is different.

But let’s start with Thai labor laws. Getting your various documents certified, translated, apostilled whatever it takes to use them in Thailand, your visa in order and your work permit all organized will require extreme knowledge and enthusiasm by your employer who is unlikely to be so helpful.

More likely they will want you to just work illegally there for awhile, which you should say no to since you can be arrested, imprisoned, fined and deported for that. Probably they won’t understand why you would want to work there for free since every hospital in Thailand is run like a business.

Even if they do, it’s going to be the 12 labors of Hercules trying to get legal.

Then your visa is tied to your job. If anything goes wrong, if you quit or get fired, you have to cancel your work permit, cancel your visa, then leave the country all that same day.

Assuming all that goes well, the Thai work environment is micro managed as a matter of culture more than anything you are probably ready for. It’s also corrupt, in that if you forego a salary, there’s a pretty good chance it will just be kept by your boss or something and won’t go to whatever you think it will.

Then there’s the politics and gossip of working with Thais. Basically if you piss someone off, possibly without even knowing it, you’re through. The whole thing starts again, you outside Thailand on a dusty Laos border, no visa, and your apartment is 600 km away in Bangkok.

I do wish you luck and it don’t want to be negative but there’s so many ways that plan will go wrong. And the benefit is that you get to work for free?

SharpBlueberry6807 none