Medical travel advisory warnings highlight risks to medical traveller safety

MTQUA warns medical tourists about dangerous conditions in the Dominican Republic, and problems in Mexico, Thailand, India and South Korea. Medical travel advisory warnings highlight risks to medical traveller safety.

The Medical Travel Quality Alliance has issued its first medical travel advisory warning medical tourists about dangerous conditions in the Dominican Republic. MTQUA has put four countries, Mexico, Thailand, India and South Korea on a medical tourism watch list due to higher risks to medical traveller safety and quality.

Julie Munro of the MTQA explains, “Medical tourism is failing to deliver quality care patients. Medical tourism is at a crossroads. Because the industry has paid too much attention to the tourism part and not enough to the medical part, medical travellers have mostly been left without the guidance or information they need in order to get the best results possible. We are very concerned about the current state of medical tourism. We believe that the risk for medical tourists has become unacceptable. The medical tourism industry has failed to live up to its promise to medical travellers of delivering better quality treatment and care for anyone seeking to travel to a foreign country for health care,”

Munro added at a medical tourism conference in Dubai:

  • As an industry, have we paid far too much attention to the tourism part of the name, and not enough to the medical part?
  • Have we left medical travellers to fend for themselves?
  • Have we abandoned the medical tourist?
  • Few of us offer medical travellers the guidance, information and support they need in order to get the best results possible at a reasonable cost and a timely manner.
  • The rest of us shed any burden of responsibility and lessen the validity of traveller concerns by stating that every medical procedure has its risks.
  • Compared with the amount of time we seem to spend talking about the tourism aspects of our industry – promotion, marketing, travel and hotel arrangements and future growth – we spend very little time talking about the medical aspects – quality, safety, risk and outcomes.
  • The medical tourism industry has failed to live up to its promise to medical travellers of delivering better quality treatment and care for anyone seeking to travel to a foreign country for health care.
  • Tourism gauges success by the size and scope of the industry, identifying the top destinations, comparing growth rates, measuring the contribution of medical tourism to Gross Domestic Product, and other Big Data facts and figures that might demonstrate success and economic potential.
  • These are the facts and figures that can be identified and counted, and thus are the numbers government departments and ministries can use to show growth and success. For more growth and success, governments put more money into more promotion, more and better publicity and more and better marketing of a destination and its features.
  • Even the most outrageous data based on misinformed assumptions and poor definitions continue to appear in scholarly research and news reports.
  • By allowing tourism data and parameters to define the industry, we have overlooked or neglected to develop, collect, and promote more meaningful data such as health care outcomes and infection rates.
  • As an industry, we have neglected to develop a better understanding of the non-clinical issues in medical and health care that affect patient outcomes. Research is showing that these non-clinical issues can significantly impact the safety and outcome of a procedure, improve the patient’s experience of the event, and increase the patient’s overall satisfaction.

Munro adds: “The patient journey for a medical traveller is longer and more complex than that of an ordinary patient. A medical traveller’s patient journey involves most if not all of the following events, and others:

  • Visit to a local agent or referrer
  • Travel planning
  • Arrival at destination and orientation
  • First medical visit
  • Admission to hospital (if in-patient)
  • Preparation for treatment
  • Treatment and primary recovery
  • Discharge from hospital (if in-patient)
  • Clearance from doctor
  • Continuing recovery
  • Return home
  • Continuing outcome monitoring
  • Closure

Julie Munro concludes, “The tourism model of medical tourism concentrates on the first three events, and the return home. Most agencies treat the other events of the medical traveller’s journey as a black hole that the patient enters alone. The medical model would not leave medical travellers on their own but would be a world of care in which agents, as medical tourism professionals would know about the non-clinical issues in medical and health care that affect patient outcomes, and be partners with providers to help deliver better quality treatment and care for medical travellers.”