Books on international medical travel

• C. Michael Hall (ed.) (2012, forthcoming) Medical Tourism: The Ethics, Regulation, and Marketing of Health Mobility (Routledge).
• Todd, M.K. (2011) Handbook of Medical Tourism Development (Routledge – Productivity Press)
• Todd, M.K. (2011) Medical Tourism Facilitator’s Handbook (Routledge – Productivity Press)
• John Connell (2011) Medical Tourism (CABI) - Abstract: 'Tourism has long been associated with improved health, resulting in a boom of spas, yoga and rejuvenation treatments. Medical tourism itself is a more recent example of niche tourism, with increasing numbers of people travelling abroad in search of cosmetic enhancement and solutions to various serious medical conditions often by surgery. Medical Tourism looks at the background and rise of health tourism, new emerging facets of the sector, and examines how medical tourism benefits local health care providers, economies and the tourism industry as a whole. It offers a unique overview of an emerging component of the tourist industry and a distinct and controversial element of health provision'.
• Minca, C. and Oakes, T. (eds.) (2011) Real Tourism: Representation, Practice and the Material in Contemporary Travel (Routledge) - This edited collection will include a chapter by Meghann Ormond entitled, 'Medical tourists, medical refugees: Responding to the pursuit of cross-border healthcare in Malaysia'.
• Connell, J. (ed.) (2010) Migration and the Globalisation of Health Care (Edward Elgar) - Abstract: 'The international migration of health workers has been described by Nelson Mandela as the ‘poaching’ of desperately needed skills from under-privileged regions. This book examines the controversial recent history of skilled migration, and explores the economic and cultural rationale behind this rise of a complex global market in qualified migrants and its multifaceted outcomes'.
• Reisman, D.A. (2010) Health Tourism: Social Welfare Through International Trade (Edward Elgar)
• Smith, M. and Puczko, L. (2009) Health and Wellness Tourism (Butterworth Heinemann) - This book lays out the history and definitions relative to this broadly defined field as well as its management and marketing peculiarities. It also includes a range of case studies contributed by several authors. It is, however, mostly geared towards wellness (e.g. spa, alternative therapies, etc) tourism. There is one medical tourism study, by B. George, looking at Apollo Hospitals in India.
• Chee H.L. and Barraclough, S. (eds.) (2009) Health Care in Malaysia: The Dynamics of Provision, Financing and Access (Routledge – Malaysian Studies Series) - This book contains information about medical tourism to Malaysia and its broader relationship to the national health system.
• Bookman, M. and Bookman, K. (2007) Medical Tourism in Developing Countries (Palgrave MacMillan) - This is the first academic book published on medical travel. It takes a political economy perspective on the real and potential advantages and disadvantages for developing countries engaged in promoting medical tourism. Abstract: 'Western patients are increasingly travelling to developing countries for health care and developing countries are increasingly offering their skills and facilities to paying foreign customers. The potential and implications of this international trade in medical services is explored in this book through analysis of the market'.

Personal narratives

• Maggi Ann Grace (2007) State of the Heart - This personal narrative tells of the medical travel experience of Grace's partner, Howard Stabb, who made headlines in the US when he went to India for heart surgery. He later testified at the US Senate Special Committee on Aging Hearings on 27 June 2006 on the benefits of medical travel for uninsured Americans. (See the webcast)

Fiction

• Robin Cook (2008) Foreign Body - This is a novel about a young Hispanic American doctor whose grandmother, unable to pay for a necessary operation in the US, goes to an Indian hospital and dies under mysterious conditions. There were concerns among industry stakeholders that the novel would have negative effects on the burgeoning industry. Interestingly enough, Cook joined up with Michael Eisner to adapt Foreign Body to WebTV, and 50 2-minute episodes are now available online. (See the episodes for free on iTunes)
  

CFP Mobilities and Health - 2011 International Medical Geography Symposium

Tony Gatrell (Lancaster) and Lucy Budd (Loughborough) are organising a special session at the International Medical Geography Symposium in Durham (10-15 July 2011) on the theme of ‘Mobilities and Health’, and invite contributions to that session. Such contributions should take the form of conventional papers delivered in a ‘slot’ of 30 minutes, allowing sufficient time for questions.

The planned session draws its inspiration primarily from the new ‘mobilities’ agenda in the social sciences; see for example, John Urry’s ‘Mobilities’ (2007, Polity Press) and the journal ‘Mobilities’: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17450101.asp. Relatively absent from much of this literature has been an exploration of the links between mobilities and health. While geographers and epidemiologists have researched associations between migration and health, and migration and disease, there are many other connections to be explored. Thus we would like to welcome contributions that examine, for example:

· ‘slow’ mobilities (such as walking and cycling), the health gains from these activities, as well as possible risks to health from road users and air pollution

· ‘fast’ mobilities (such as automobile and air travel - again, the health gains and risks, and the implications for those who are not-mobile

· tourists and their health and well-being, as well as their access to health care

· the health and healthcare of those who are forcibly displaced

· the spread of disease in historical and contemporary settings

· the mobilities of health care and health-related information

Contributions are invited that address any of the above, or other areas related to mobility and health.

The Symposium organisers have asked for Abstracts by January 14^th 2011. Lucy and Tony would like to suggest that interested contributors contact them by December 14^th in order that they can plan the session. Please contact Tony Gatrell in the first instance: a.gatrell (at) lancaster.ac.uk

2011 AAG sessions on medical mobilities

2011 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference (Seattle, 12-16 April)

Session: Geographies of Global Health Care: From Spaces of Exception to Enclaves of Individuation, Experimentation and Exploitation

Session Organizers: Matthew Sparke & Meghann Ormond

Tuesday, 4/12/11, from 12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in 2A - Washington State Convention Center Level 2

Forged in the context of globalization, global health policies and practices have significantly denationalized older traditions of international health and public health. The complex processes of reterritorialization involved raise diverse research challenges for geographers ranging from the macro mapping of global disease etiologies and responses aimed at the world’s poor to investigating the micro geographies of risk management by the privileged consumers of personalized and privatized medicine. This session approaches these concerns with reterritorialization by examining a diverse set of global health care scenes around the world. Designed to care for people and address health problems that have been cut off from publicly provided national health services, these new global health care scenes are supported and staffed through diverse global ties and space-spanning movements of medicine. At the same time, though, they simultaneously reveal all sorts of ways in which care is geographically enclaved and assembled in particularistic, post-national ways. Instead, of spaces of exception, therefore, they present us with a window on to fractured scenes of global health care diversely defined by new processes of individuation, experimentation and exploitation.

Paper 1: Global politics collides with local knowledge: The fractured ‘scene’ of HIV/AIDS care in South Africa

Todd Faubion, University of Washington

Paper 2: Health clinic enclaves: Micro-territorializing global health

Patricia Lopez, University of Washington

Paper 3: Medical travel guidebooks and the production of landscapes of care

Meghann Ormond, Wageningen University, and Matthew Sothern, University of St Andrews

Paper 4: Assembling around the ageing body: working the care/cure, global/local distinctions

Parvati Raghuram, Open University

Paper 5: The Geography of Global Health Targets and the Enclaving of Aid and Research

Matthew Sparke, University of Washington

Chair: Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfrid Laurier University

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Session: Mobilizing Care: Uneven Geographies and the Spatial Governance of Global Health

Session Organizers: Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfred Laurier University, and Mark Lawrence Santiago, University of British Colombia

Wednesday, 4/13/2011, from 2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in Ballard - Sheraton Hotel, Pike Tower, Third Floor

Showing exactly how economic injustice creates poverty and ill health is a challenge for much work on global health, but analyzing such practices is necessary in order to encourage effective responses from governments and relevant supranational bodies. Global health inequalities and inequities are a product of, and sustain, the current market system. The challenge for researchers keen to demonstrate how multiple injustices shape health is to rescale their impact from the macro to the meso and the micro scale across various contexts, including the pharmaceutical trade, medical outsourcing, health worker migration, medical tourism, organ and surrogacy trade. These sessions aim to address the issue of global health at several scales, but with the overall aim of demonstrating how global political economic processes are rescaled to the level of the individual, institutions and vice versa, and by what means such processes construct and reproduce landscapes of health and health care inequality and inequity.

Paper 1: Importing Nurses: Needs, Rights and Care

Kim England, University of Washington

Paper 2: Global nurses, rural nurses: divides and disconnects between international nurse migration and health care delivery in India

Margaret W. Walton-Roberts, Wilfred Laurier University

Paper 3: Producing Global Nurses: Ethical Recruitment and the Labor Brokerage State

Mark Lawrence Santiago, University of British Colombia

Paper 4: Who are Canada's medical tourists? An account of Canadians' involvement in medical tourism from the perspectives of facilitators

Rory Johnston, Simon Fraser University

Paper 5: Do You Know the Way to San José? Medical Tourism in Costa Rica

Barney Warf, University of Kansas

Chair: Meghann Ormond, Wageningen University