Intra‐regional medical travel by patients from Indonesia to Penang in Malaysia is embedded in and facilitated by regional circuits. Although such movement is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the health‐care services offered in Indonesia, we argue that these contemporary movements for health care are also a continuation of existing exchanges for trade, education and cultural ties that have long existed. In the first part of the paper, we consider the historical interconnections between the locations of Medan and Aceh in Indonesia and Penang in Malaysia. Based upon fieldwork and interviews with 70 intra‐regional patients travelling to Penang for treatment, we describe how these interconnections are now manifested in travel for medical care. We argue that the temporary exit from the Indonesian health system to pursue care in hospitals in Penang by some Chinese Indonesians and Acehnese follows patterns and logics based on social histories of discrimination and conflict as well as geographical convenience. This highlights the need to contextualise such travel not just as geographic movements across space but also through the depth of time and local histories.
International medical travel may be viewed as an ‘assemblage’ of various components such as infrastructure, hospitals, finance, transport, technologies, staff, facilitators and patients. In this paper, we focus on the articulations of medical travel facilitators (MTFs) and private hospitals in producing international medical travel in the context of the neoliberalising processes that had led to the rise of corporate hospital care in Malaysia in the 1990s. We draw from three hospital case studies for a comparative perspective. We highlight the shifting, unstable and contingent relations and interactions of the MTFs, as one component of the assemblage of international medical travel, with hospitals and medical travellers. We identify the practices of MTFs in providing patients with information and advice about hospitals and doctors as efforts to shape patients' choices in the selection of health‐care providers and in decision‐making. The assemblage approach allows us to see how the MTFs emerge and stabilise as a collective identity for individuals and companies performing particular functions through their multifarious articulations with other components in various sites of assemblage.
Two duelling slogans, '1Care for 1Malaysia' and 'Tak Nak [Reject] 1Care', provide a succinct representation of what can arguably be considered the most contentious issue in healthcare for Malaysian society spanning the last three decades. The tagline '1Care for 1Malaysia' invokes the health plan that was prepared by the Ministry of Health (MOH) for the Tenth Malaysia Plan (2011-2015) (MOH c. 2010). The health plan is a comprehensive overall policy document that sets the vision and direction for the nation's healthcare sector. Central amongst the various programmes described in the document is a statement of intent for a 'restructured Malaysian health system' (ibid.: 51) that revolves around the establishment of a long-awaited social health insurance scheme. '1Care' refers to this proposed national health financing scheme. Its announcement by the MOH at the Tenth Malaysia Health Plan Conference on 2 February 2010 met with diverse responses, with the most vocal resistance coming from the Citizens' Healthcare Coalition (CHC), which organized a series of seminars between February and June 2012 to garner support for a stand against the plan, and a 'Tak Nak 1Care' campaign initiated through the internet.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.