Wednesday, 17 November 2010

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

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Tuesday, 26 October 2010

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

....................................................

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

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Monday, 24 May 2010

Bodies Across Borders: The global circulation of body parts, medical tourists and medical professionals

Fondation Brocher, Switzerland, 15 - 17 December 2010

Workshop Rationale

The fields of medicine and healthcare are being transformed by new communications and biomedical technologies, which have facilitated marked increases in the global circulation of body parts, patients and medical professionals across national borders. These movements often echo other movements of capital and resources, travelling from rural to urban areas, from poor to rich, and from the Global South to the Global North. These movements also raise a number of specific concerns depending on the kind of body (body part, patient or professional) circulating. Consequently academic and policy debates tend to focus on particular issues and perspectives with little opportunity for scholars, policy makers and professionals in medicine and healthcare to discuss their experiences and share insights into the different ways in which bodies cross national borders.

This workshop will bring together researchers working on different kinds of bodily circulations within the global healthcare and medical environments to explore common themes, concerns and issues, including:

- The underlying structural and economic inequalities between nations and peoples which drive much of the trade in bodily commodities and movements of medical tourists and medical professionals.

- The impacts of these movements on the health care industry of the countries that supply medical professionals, healthcare services and body-parts (usually in the Global South) and the countries that receive medical professionals, services and body parts (usually in the Global North).

- The challenge of reconciling the practices, standards and expectations of medical professionals and patients from different countries and healthcare traditions and the question of how and to what extent these circulations of healthcare workers, medical tourists and bodily commodities should be internationally monitored and regulated.

The one-and-a-half day workshop will be organised thematically, with three separate sessions each focusing on a different kind of circulation. This will then be followed by a round-table discussion, focused on the key research questions outlined above, in order to identify shared themes and connections, and possibilities for future collaborations and research relationships.

Workshop organisers and sponsor

The workshop is organised by members of the Health, Place and Society research theme, based in the Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of London and is sponsored by the Fondation Brocher. The workshop will be hosted by the Fondation Brocher, (www.brocher.ch), at their centre in Hermance, Switzerland.
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Wednesday, 5 May 2010

International Medical Travel and Tourism Academic Study List

I've just started a listserv called the "International Medical Travel and Tourism Academic Study List" (visit https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=MEDICAL-TRAVEL to register) for dedicated academic researchers across the globe. Please do register and get involved in developing our budding community. It's really important for us to produce knowledge about the international medical travel industry as it develops so that we might be able to help shape its course.
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Wednesday, 6 January 2010

Medical travel guidebooks

A handful of guidebooks geared to prospective individual medical travellers has been published since 2006. Here are links to them:

  • Josef Woodman (2007) Patients Beyond Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism, First edition; Patients Beyond Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Travel, Second edition
  • David Hancock (2006) The Complete Medical Tourist: Your Guide to Inexpensive and Safe Cosmetic and Medical Surgery Overseas
  • Jeff Shult (2006) Beauty from Afar: A Medical Tourist’s Guide to Afforable and Quality Cosmetic Care Outside the US
  • Paul Gahlinger (2008) The Medical Tourism Travel Guide: Your Complete Reference to Top-Quality, Low-Cost Dental, Cosmetic and Medical Care Overseas
  • Frances Sharpe and Patrick W. Marsek (2009) The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Medical Tourism (Soon to be released)

The Patients Beyond Borders guide has now launched a series of country-specific and medical condition-specific editions. It is already starting to publish institution-specific profiles as well.

  • Singapore (1st and 2nd editions, available in English and Arabic)
  • Taiwan
  • South Korea
  • Malaysia



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Wednesday, 29 July 2009

Links to academic and policy references on medical travel

These links sections will be updated from time to time, so please check back. Meanwhile, I've discovered a continuously revised list of publications on medical travel hosted by Dr Robert Bristow of Westfield State College: http://www.wsc.ma.edu/medicaltourism/medtourbib.htm

General
Asia
Americas
European Union
Middle East
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Saturday, 25 July 2009

Medical Tourism City

An interesting new online community called 'Medical Tourism City' has recently sprouted up: http://www.medicaltourismcity.com/. It seems to be pretty interactive and includes groups, forums, chat space, blogs, events postings and the like. There's a group dedicated to Medical Tourism Research, set up by Prof David Vequist (find out more about his group's work at http://www.medicaltourismresearch.org), and one on Ethics in Medical Tourism, set up by Dr Steve Green, a physician involved in the Trent Accreditation Scheme for Hospitals.
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Wednesday, 8 July 2009

Visual/audio reports on medical travel

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Saturday, 10 January 2009

The Death of Mr Lazarescu

The dark Romanian comedy, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, directed by Cristi Piui, is a stellar film I had the fortune to watch last night. It addresses a range of timely issues pertinent to those of us concerned with 'medical mobilities' -- demonstrating the life-threatening confusion of being shuttled back and forth within a national healthcare system in disarray, highlighting the power struggles and egotistical posturing that plague the medical profession, and questioning whether individuals are responsible for taking care of their health in order to avoid burdening overloaded health systems.
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Transnational Mobilities for Care: State, Market and Family Dynamics in Asia

Co-organisers: Asian Migration Cluster and The Changing Family in Asia Cluster of the Asia Research Institute
Date: 09/09/2009 - 11/09/2009
Venue: ARI Seminar Room
 469A Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road
 National University of Singapore @ BTC

For more information: http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/events_categorydetails.asp?categoryid=6&eventid=870

Description:
This conference is focussed on issues surrounding the transnational mobilities for care, specifically eldercare and healthcare, in Asia. Three observable trends in recent decades provide the context for our inquiry. First, the demographic trend points to rapidly aging populations in many Asian countries. As larger proportions of people live longer after retirement, this has given rise to the classic problem of a relatively smaller working population having to support an enlarging group of retirees.

Second, the curtailment of public spending in some developed countries in the 1980s and 1990s negatively affected the supply of health care personnel in the 1990s and beyond, which in turn created a strong demand-led migration of care workers from poorer countries to richer ones. Furthermore, state policies which encouraged privatisation and corporate healthcare growth eventually led to an increasingly dominant role for the private sector in health care provision and financing.

A third trend, observed in changing social mores, conventions, and family and gender roles, has had discernible effects on care-giving in the family. Not only has delayed marriage, non-marriage, and the rise of singlehood meant that those who grow old in the new millennium are increasingly less likely to have family members who can provide care, but changing attitudes have also contributed to this effect.

The convergence of these three trends in the region has resulted in a crisis of care and social security in some countries – increasingly inadequate pensions and more pressing need for elder care, a concomitant shortage of care workers and healthcare personnel and rising healthcare costs. In some other countries, depleting healthcare resources and expertise has led to a crisis of no smaller proportions in the healthcare systems, and where state-provided care is non existent, families are stretched to care for both the sick and the infirm.

As these trends play out in the Asian region, where countries differ in their levels of economic development, transnational options appear to present themselves. In order to stretch their pensions, for example, Japanese pensioners (as well as pensioners from other countries) have moved to Southeast Asian countries where domestic care, nursing care, and healthcare are more cheaply and easily accessible. On the other side of the equation, the lack of opportunities in economies such as the Philippines and Indonesia have led many to seek employment as caregivers and healthcare professionals in countries where the demand is strong but the supply weak.

In addition to the geopolitical social hierarchy of nations, the social class dimension within each country provides more layers of complexities. Even as personnel and expertise are drained from a poorer country’s healthcare services, its wealthier residents travel abroad to seek medical care in a phenomenon that has come to be termed ‘medical tourism’. In many countries, governments and private corporations have turned their attention to cultivating and expanding the transnational markets for care and healthcare. States, at both the receiving and sending ends, are tailoring policies to encourage one type of movement or discourage another. The regional integration of healthcare markets on the one hand and the depletion of public services on the other, is in many cases leading to a polarisation between those who can pay for private healthcare and those who have to rely on the depleting public healthcare services.

This conference is convened to examine the nexus of the family, the market, and the state in relation to the transnational mobilities of care in the geo-political context of an ageing Asian region. We invite scholars to reflect on the following questions:

 * In the social hierarchies of nations and the geo-politics of care, who moves where and why?
 * What are the processes of power and decision-making in the family relating to eldercare and healthcare in the context of changing social norms?
 * What are the complex political processes and ideological discourses that have led to particular state policies in relation to care, the family, and transnational movements
 * What are the motivations and patterns of movement for care-givers and the consequences for the sending countries?
 * What are the motivations and patterns of movement of care-seekers and the impact on the host societies?
 * How has the market responded to these transnational movements, and what is the nature of state-market relations in the politics of care?
 * What is the impact of these transnational movements on (re)shaping gender regimes and cultural notions of care?
 * How can we conceptualize the transnationalisation of care and carework that is currently occuring within the shifting dynamics of family, state and market?

Issues investigated may fall within, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

Changing Family and Care Provision

Government rhetoric of care provision in much of Asia is that the family looks after its own and should continue to do so. Yet it is recognized that this will be increasingly difficult in the face of rapidly rising proportions of elderly, rising singlehood, and changing cultural and social norms, including changing gender roles in family and society. Strategies adopted by families to deal with this often involve internationalization of care, which may include recruiting foreign domestic workers for eldercare, obtaining a foreign wife through a matchmaking agency to provide care for elderly parents, and in the case of families operating transnationally as a result of overseas postings or education of children, frequent visits back by family members to deal with needs of elderly parents. Families of foreign domestic workers in the source countries have their own eldercare needs. To what extent are the decisions that result in internationalization of families individual or family decisions, and to what extent do care needs feature in them? To what extent has government policy caught up with reality in these regards? How can these trends and challenges be conceptualized?

Transnational Healthcare Work

This panel looks at the structural conditions and social dynamics of transnational eldercare work in the context of Asia. It focuses on the growing phenomenon of transnational healthcare workers from Asia who provide services to the elderly in private and public institutions, as well as in private homes, and asks questions such as: What are the structural positions of care workers (along gender, ethnic, nationality and skills lines) within the broader hierarchy of (re)productive labour in the context of the global labour market as well as local markets? How do gendered and other ideologies socially construct the roles and identities of (local vs foreign) careworkers? How does the transnational migration of healthcare workers impact sending and receiving societies? What roles do sending and receiving states, and other institutional stakeholders (such as labour agents, care institutions, etc.) play in regulating the flow of healthcare workers? What are the implications of these flows for state policies on eldercare, social welfare and (im)migration? In seeking to provide answers to these questions, the papers in this panel should aim to contribute to broader theoretical debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of carework, as well as the negotiation of gender relations in labour markets.

Transnational Retirement Migration

While established migration theories have long asserted international migration to be a venture of the young and healthy, persons of retirement ages are now increasingly on the move. Increasing numbers of elderly are moving from the West and Japan to live in Southeast Asia on a long term basis. Their migration behaviours and the social consequences often differ from what are known to migration scholars in significant ways, for example their mobility is characterized by a pendulum pattern of moving back and forth, which is neither tourism nor migration, but has elements of both. Seeking somewhere abroad with lower living costs has become an imperative residential strategy for retirees. This may not be surprising given the accelerating process of population ageing. But what is peculiar to Asia, particularly in comparison to Europe, is that countries on the receiving side have actively developed various programs to attract affluent foreign retirees as part of their new "development" strategy. The term “retirement industry” is now officially adopted by such public institutes as the Philippines Retirement Authorities. How does retirement migration relate to the broader migration and development regime in Asia? What are the implications of this transnational mobility on the elderly migrants’ sense of home and family? By investigating in-depth cases of international migration of retirees in Asia, the panel aims to contribute to broader theoretical debates on how citizenship, welfare (and care) provision, nation-state, and family relations are being reconfigured on a transnational scale.

Medical Tourism / Travel

This panel aims to interrogate the complex interrelationship between healthcare systems, the market in healthcare, and transnational movements of healthcare consumers; as well as the consequences of these processes on healthcare access and equity in sending and receiving countries, and on the practice and utilization of healthcare. Writings on the international travel for medical services have generally treated it as niche tourism, or trade in health services, with either positive effects for economic development or negative effects on the equitable distribution of healthcare. Concentrating on the phenomenon as it has unravelled in Asia since the late 1990s, this panel will focus on how this trend and its accoutrements – such as standardisation, packaging, and marketing – can be conceptualised or theorised. Papers may be based on empirical research and in-depth case studies, while addressing questions relating to the role of the state vis-à-vis the medical tourist industry, the changes in the medical profession and the way in which medicine is practised, and the ways in which healthcare is used or consumed. The panel will also aim to address larger issues of the geopolitics of (transnational) healthcare consumption and financing, the political economy of transnational healthcare, and healthcare policy in a transnational era.
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