South-South cross-border patient travel to South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper explores intra-regional South-South cross-border patient travel within the context of Southern Africa. South Africa, in particular, has been widely touted as one of the emerging destinations of high-end patients from the Global North alongside other destinations such as Brazil, India, Costa Rica and Thailand. Using South Africa as a case study, the paper demonstrates that South-South cross-border patient travel is far more significant than North-South patient travel both in numerical and financial terms. Every year, thousands of patients from neighbouring countries travel to South Africa in search of medical treatment for procedures that are not offered in their own countries. Despite its size and importance, the South-South flow of patients in Southern Africa is not fully understood and requires further scholarly research.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-border patients
• health
• medical tourism
• medical travel
• North-South
• South-South
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Abel Chikanda http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7146-7976

Jonathan Crush http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3342-3192