New podcast with Hiraeth Magazine: Hiraeth Ep. 27- Heritage From Below - Meghann Ormond

Stories about Meghann Ormond's life and work have been featured in a Hiraeth Project (http://hiraethmagazine.com) podcast episode about her personal migratory and citizenship experiences, the extraordinary transcontinental journey her mother undertook to discover her biological roots, and the research she has done for more than a decade on issues related to transnational mobility like healthcare-motivated travel (aka 'medical tourism') and migrant heritage practices. 

Check out the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/hiraethmagazine/hiraeth-ep-27-heritage-from-below 

Description:
A year ago, Hiraeth was invited to participate in a session on “Whose Heritages Matter” during a conference at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Meghann Ormond, Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen, speaks about her own heritage, from her two passport countries, the U.S. and Portugal, as well as the Netherlands, where she has made her home for the past eight years, and other countries that have touched her life.

Meghann’s own identity has been shaped by both her own travels around the world and her multifaceted family history, including her mother’s search for her birth parents on two continents. Through this experience, she realised:

“We are all inheritors of extraordinarily transnational stories.”

Heritage from Below is an acknowledgement that the everyday stories and lives of ordinary people should be included as a part of history. Meghann started the Heritage from Below Educational and Research Collective (HERC) to bring together cultural heritage and history scholars, practitioners and educators to help children of all backgrounds feel that their history and culture are important and recognised as part of a larger whole.

This episode also features music by Ketsa (copyright) ketsamusic.com/ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License without endorsement.

hiraethmagazine.com/podcast/

New special issue in Global Public Health: 'Im/Mobilities and Dis/Connectivities in Medical Globalization: How Global is Global Health?'

In December 2017, a special issue on transnational health was published in the journal Global Public Health: Im/Mobilities and Dis/Connectivities in Medical Globalization: How Global is Global Health?

Contents:

• Im/mobilities and dis/connectivities in medical globalisation: How global is Global Health?
• Hansjörg Dilger & Dominik Mattes
• Made in Denmark: Scientific mobilities and the place of pedagogy in global health
• Branwyn Poleykett
• (Dis)connectivities in wartime: The therapeutic geographies of Iraqi healthcare–seeking in Lebanon
• Omar Dewachi, Anthony Rizk & Neil V. Singh
• State-of-the-art or the art of medicine? Transnational mobility and perceptions of multiple biomedicines among Nigerian physicians in the U.S.
• Judith Schühle
• International clinical volunteering in Tanzania: A postcolonial analysis of a Global Health business
• Noelle Sullivan
• Stock-outs! Improvisations and processes of infrastructuring in Uganda’s HIV/Aids and malaria programmes
• René Umlauf & Sung-Joon Park
• From coastal to global: The transnational flow of Ayurveda and its relevance for Indo-African linkages
• Caroline Meier zu Biesen
• Negotiating horizontality in medical South–South cooperation: The Cuban mission in Rio de Janeiro’s urban peripheries
• Maria Lidola & Fabiano Tonaco Borges
• ‘Exotic no more’: Tuberculosis, public debt and global health in Berlin
• Janina Kehr

New book: The Private Healthcare Sector in Johor: Trends and Prospects

The Private Healthcare Sector in Johor: Trends and Prospects

By Meghann Ormond and Lim Chee Han[1]

Citation:

Ormond, M. and Lim, C.H. (2018) The private healthcare sector in Johor: Trends and prospects, Singapore: ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. ISBN 978-981-4818-71-1 (soft cover)/ISBN 978-981-4818-72-8 (ebook, PDF) -- Available for purchase at: https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/ 

Executive Summary

·         The future of the private healthcare in Johor and in the Iskandar Malaysia (IM) special economic zone in particular is intimately tied to larger property developments and trends in the region, both because private healthcare developers are increasingly the same as property developers and because IM’s future population growth relies heavily on corporate settlement in IM and the jobs that such settlement generates. Volatility in corporate investment and settlement in IM may have significant consequences for the sector’s development.

·         The Federal and Johor State Governments intend to turn IM into a world-class private healthcare destination for local residents and foreign visitors alike. A range of strategies and policies have been launched to develop IM’s medical care, aged care, and lifestyle and wellbeing sectors.

·         It is essential to track the impact of federal and regional fiscal incentives for private healthcare development and monitor actual demand for private-sector capacity in order to assess the value and utility of such incentives, especially given the potential for such incentives policies to promote the generation of excessive private-sector hospital and clinical capacity if left unchecked.

·         Private healthcare providers in the region depend mostly on local residents as their consumer base because Johor and IM are not (yet) significant medical tourism destinations. Given the current rate of expansion of existing hospitals and construction of new ones in Johor and specifically in IM, local demand must be secured via measures that increase the Johor household income base, foster interstate migration, attract higher-income talent in larger numbers to live in the region, and improve quality of life in the region.

·         To strengthen medical tourism, private players – both large and small – require greater coordination and cooperation at the regional level in promoting medical tourism and in setting up centres of excellence and medical tourist-friendly services that cater to the actual needs of international patients.

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[1] Meghann Ormond is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Lim Chee Han is Senior Analyst at Penang Institute, Malaysia.