Transnational medical travel: Patient mobility, shifting health system entitlements and attachments

TY - JOUR

T1 - Transnational medical travel:

T2 - Patient mobility, shifting health system entitlements and attachments

AU - Ormond, Meghann

AU - Lunt, Neil

N1 - © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

PY - 2019/5/11

Y1 - 2019/5/11

N2 - Transnational medical travel -- the temporary movement by patients across national borders in order to address medical concerns abroad that are unable to be sufficiently met within their countries of residence -- is an important therapeutic coping strategy used by growing proportions of peoples with adiverse range of mobility profiles and intensities of global moorings. Studying this phenomenon provides useful insight into the rapidly globalising era of health governance, where an ever-wider array of state and non-state actors are transcending the increasingly restrictive national containerisations of health care and engaging in cross-border action to effectively address contemporary health challenges at both individual and collective levels. In our introduction to thisspecial issue on transnational medical travel, we draw on both ‘medical tourism’ and migrant health scholarship to acknowledge the diversity of motivations among migrant and non-migrant patients alike and the complex nature of mobile patients’ attachments to the multiple places in which they seekcare. We then bring attention to how dynamic structural issues in mobile patients’ countries of residence and destination shape their attachments to places and health systems over time, examining the linkages between vitality of the political and social systems in these places to which they aredifferently attached and their dis/satisfaction and dis/enfranchisement with them.

AB - Transnational medical travel -- the temporary movement by patients across national borders in order to address medical concerns abroad that are unable to be sufficiently met within their countries of residence -- is an important therapeutic coping strategy used by growing proportions of peoples with adiverse range of mobility profiles and intensities of global moorings. Studying this phenomenon provides useful insight into the rapidly globalising era of health governance, where an ever-wider array of state and non-state actors are transcending the increasingly restrictive national containerisations of health care and engaging in cross-border action to effectively address contemporary health challenges at both individual and collective levels. In our introduction to thisspecial issue on transnational medical travel, we draw on both ‘medical tourism’ and migrant health scholarship to acknowledge the diversity of motivations among migrant and non-migrant patients alike and the complex nature of mobile patients’ attachments to the multiple places in which they seekcare. We then bring attention to how dynamic structural issues in mobile patients’ countries of residence and destination shape their attachments to places and health systems over time, examining the linkages between vitality of the political and social systems in these places to which they aredifferently attached and their dis/satisfaction and dis/enfranchisement with them.

U2 - 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1597465

DO - 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1597465

M3 - Special issue

SN - 1369-183X

JO - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

JF - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ER -