Journal ArticleDOI
Globalization and healthcare: understanding health and medical tourism
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This paper underscored the issue of a severely limited formal literature that is compounded by conceptual ambiguity facing health and medical tourism scholarship, and provided evidence with regard to the scale of trade in healthcare.Abstract:
Faced with long waiting lists, the high cost of elective treatment and fewer barriers to travel, the idea of availing healthcare in another country is gaining greater appeal to many. The objective of this review is to perform a literature review of health and medical tourism, to define health and medical tourism based on the medical literature and to estimate the size of trade in healthcare. The Medline database was used for our literature review. In our initial search for 'health tourism' and 'medical tourism' we found a paucity of formal literature as well as conceptual ambiguity in the literature. Subsequently, we reviewed the literature on 'tourism' in general and in the context of healthcare. On the basis of 149 papers, we then sought to conceptualize health tourism and medical tourism. Based on our definitions, we likewise sought to estimate market capacity internationally. We defined health tourism as "the organized travel outside one's local environment for the maintenance, enhancement or restoration of an individual's wellbeing in mind and body". A subset of this is medical tourism, which is "the organized travel outside one's natural healthcare jurisdiction for the enhancement or restoration of the individual's health through medical intervention". At the international level, health tourism is an industry sustained by 617 million individuals with an annual growth of 3.9% annually and worth US$513 billion. In conclusion, this paper underscored the issue of a severely limited formal literature that is compounded by conceptual ambiguity facing health and medical tourism scholarship. In clarifying the concepts and standardizing definitions, and providing evidence with regard to the scale of trade in healthcare, we hope to assist in furthering fundamental research tasks, including the further development of reliable and comparable data, the push and pull factors for engaging in health and medical tourism, and the impact of health tourism but, more so, medical tourism on local healthcare systems.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Contemporary medical tourism: Conceptualisation, culture and commodification
TL;DR: An overview is given of the short history and rapid rise of medical tourism, its documentation, and current knowledge and analysis of the industry.
Journal ArticleDOI
Medical tourism: assessing the evidence on treatment abroad.
Neil Lunt,Percivil Carrera +1 more
TL;DR: The review sought to identify the medical tourist literature for out-of-pocket payments, focusing wherever possible on evidence and experience pertaining to patients in mid-life and beyond, and drew attention to gaps in research evidence.
Journal ArticleDOI
'First world health care at third world prices': globalization, bioethics and medical tourism.
TL;DR: Reductions in health benefits offered by states and employers will likely increase the number of individuals looking for affordable medical care in a global market of privatized, commercial health care delivery.
Journal ArticleDOI
Medical tourism and policy implications for health systems: a conceptual framework from a comparative study of Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia
Nicola S. Pocock,Kai Hong Phua +1 more
TL;DR: A conceptual framework is presented that outlines the policy implications of medical tourism's growth for health systems, drawing on the cases of Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, three regional hubs for medical tourism, via an extensive review of academic and grey literature.
Journal ArticleDOI
What is known about the effects of medical tourism in destination and departure countries? A scoping review
TL;DR: It is observed that what is currently known about the effects of medical tourism is minimal, unreliable, geographically restricted and mostly based on speculation.
References
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Qualitative Evaluation And Research Methods
TL;DR: The Nature of Qualitative Inquiry Theoretical Orientations Particularly Appropriate Qualitative Applications as mentioned in this paper, and Qualitative Interviewing: Qualitative Analysis and Interpretation Enhancing the quality and credibility of qualitative analysis and interpretation.
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TL;DR: The discipline and practice of qualitative research have been extensively studied in the literature as discussed by the authors, including the work of Denzin and Denzin, and their history in sociology and anthropology, as well as the role of women in qualitative research.
Journal Article
Qualitative evaluation and research methods
TL;DR: The Nature of Qualitative Inquiry Theoretical Orientations Particularly Appropriate Qualitative Applications as mentioned in this paper, and Qualitative Interviewing: Qualitative Analysis and Interpretation Enhancing the quality and credibility of qualitative analysis and interpretation.
Book
Qualitative Data Analysis
TL;DR: In the field of qualitative data analysis, qualitative data is extremely varied in nature. It includes virtually any information that can be captured that is not numerical in nature as mentioned in this paper, which is a generalization of direct observation.