The United Kingdom’s Somali populations as medical nomads

ABSTRACT

Much medical travel scholarship has been driven by a commercial focus whereby private providers pursue a high-value and complex patient market, primarily emanating from the Middle East, North America and Western Europe. This emphasis has led to a framing around ‘medical tourism’, prompting countervailing critiques of the term and the introduction of alternatives including ‘medical pilgrimage’ and ‘medical exile’. Reappraising the dynamics of mobility has led to explanations of medical travel increasingly located in fields of diaspora and transnationalism. The article identifies how diasporas and transnational communities resist straightforward categorisation regarding the routes and processes through which they utilise healthcare. In this vein the article introduces the concept of ‘medical nomadism’ and grounds it in the experiences of Somali patients’ travel from the United Kingdom for healthcare overseas. It argues medical nomadism is a distinct medical travel behaviour, pointing to similar behaviours of Cape Verdeans living in Netherlands, and the concept’s utility in interrogating broader health-seeking mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical tourism
• pilgrim
• exile
• medical nomad
• transnationalism
• Somali

Acknowledgement

Anonymous journal reviewers made extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to Meghann Ormond and Daniel Horsfall.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Department of health disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the HS&DR Programme, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health.

Notes

1 Hammond et al. (2011) notes the Somali diaspora also encompasses ethnic Somalis from Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

2 We also spoke to a group of Gujarati travellers. Across these combined three groups (two Somali, one Gujarati) provided evidence from 31 individuals.

3 In one of our group areas, additional funding was provided to employ a Somali nurse at the local surgery who acted as the first point of contact for Somali patients. This was extremely well received and allowed language and cultural differences to be both understood and interpreted in partnership with the GP.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme (project number 09/2001/21).