Medical Tourism

Hall (2011) reviewed a wide range of literature to delineate the major issues in medical tourism and tried to find out relationship between wellness tourism, transplant tourism, abortion tourism, dental tourism etc. Hall accumulated 294 articles from Scopus database and noted that extensive literature is available about medical tourism but no any empirical research has been yet conducted. Fundamentally, Reasons for emerging of medical tourism are cheaper cross-border services, conjunction with exotic location for holiday, migrants preferred to get treated in home country, regulatory cost dimensions (Banned treatments) and non-availability of organ in the country. Hall raised the issue like ethics, public health risk due to medical tourism,

The study focused on the changes with respect to medical tourism in the healthcare industry and a variety of stakeholders due to ethical and patient discourse. The study has been taken place by analyzing articles published in high end newspapers of English language from UK and USA, three from each country. A trustworthy database, LexisNexix, Search engine, was exploited to explore articles using search term ‘medical tourism’ and 119 articles were unearthed. The study raised four basic issues of medical tourism which are mainly medical discourse, market discourse, ethical discourse and patient discourse. High quality health services, standardized medical facilities, ethical relations, value proposition for the patients, relationship between public and health and health literacy are the issues which were covered under the study. The study found that a well defined campaigning, health literacy, communication empowerment and well positioning of the patients were required to attract the foreign

The study has tried to map the network of facilitators and issues of tourists with the help of Deloitte value chain model. Survey has been carried out in 17 cities of India collecting 503 responses from 35 hospitals. Indian medical facilitators attract African (51%) and Middle East (35%) patients at a large scale. At the pre procedure stage, a significant gap was found in expectations and experience of the patients. Cost of treatment was considered as the leading gap while quality treatment, ease of access and small waiting time were also important factors for Indian medical tourism. But at the procedure stage, language was the only barrier for the patients. So, paramedical staff needs to focus on the communication skills also. At last respondents expected that post procedure stage must be hassle free. The study suggested that policies for medical visa should be revised and a niche segment is necessary to locate by the service providers because each competitor country has developed a USP in medical