Medical tourism globe-trotting: Features, impacts, and risks

ABSTRACT

Today, the medical tourism industry has a projected growth rate of up to 25% year-over-year for the next 10 years and it is estimated that 3–4% of the world’s population will travel internationally for healthcare. The purpose of this article is to give a brief insight into relevant topics of medical tourism that remain undefined, unsolved or unregulated. The expected impacts of medical tourism include possible ethical, legal, and medical risks arising as a result of differences in particular countries in the standards applied in medical tourism institutions/facilities. Different standards of medical care, differences in legal systems and regulations, and taken procedures could result in unethical situations mainly due to the absence of internationally prescribed laws and accreditations related to medical tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical risks
• impact
• legal risks
• medical risks
• medical tourism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Z. Radovcic was educated in Croatia where following his family tradition he graduated from Zagreb Law School at Zagreb University/LLM/. After completing his Lawyer State exam he joined his family’s Attorney at Law office. Following his formal education, Mr Radovcic went on to study complementary and alternative health methods. He received his knowledge at several top institutes in Asia. In 2011, he completed his MBA in Leadership and Management in Health Systems at Zagreb Medical School, Croatia/MHA/. He acted as an active member of several NGOs and a President of Wellness Croatia within the Croatian Chamber of Commerce. Also, he is the founder of HTI Conference, which has been a leading health tourism industry event in Europe for the last seven years.

I. A. Nola has PhD in biomedical sciences; currently work as Associate Professor at Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Sports Medicine at School of Medicine, Andrija Stampar School of Public Health, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The area of work includes: public health emergencies; environmental factors and related health effects; sociological aspects of environmental health and medical tourism.