Online narratives about medical tourism in Malaysia and Thailand: a qualitative content analysis

ABSTRACT

This study explored the written online narratives about medical tourism in Malaysia and Thailand using qualitative content analysis. The Google search engine was used for narrative search. Multiple search terms including medical, health, wellness tourism; treatment abroad; medical or health travel; treatment, surgery, or plastic surgery; dental treatment or braces were used to obtain related blog posts, discussions, and forums via a purposeful sampling method. A total of 43 online narratives were included in this study. Themes were then created after an iterative analysis of the selected online comments or posts. The push factors that act as motivators were: cost (100%), attractions (81%), availability of facilitators (62%), physician’s background and expertise (58%), bandwagon effect (42%). The majority of the subjects (88%) stated that they were satisfied with the outcomes of their medical treatments received in Malaysia and Thailand.

KEYWORDS:

• Health services management
• health tourism
• plastic surgery
• patient preference
• cost reduction

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Ministry of Higher Education and Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia, for financial support for this research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/10548408.2016.1250697

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academic and Research Assimilation [600-RMI/DANA 5/3/ARAS (0037/2016)]; Ministry of Higher Education; Universiti Teknologi MARA.