Interrogating Medical Tourism: Ireland, Abortion, and Mobility Rights

A Comprehensive Perspective on Medical Tourism Context and Create a Conceptual Framework

“…Having been identified in previous research, challenge in the tourism market is that motivation need to be understood by diverse perspectives of features [30]. Therefore, tourist motivation is an important factor in explaining tourist behavior in relation to destination choice, relating to the needs, goals, and preference of the tourists [21].…”

Migrants and healthcare: Investigating patient mobility among migrants in Ireland

“…They also report that in some instances insurance companies encourage people to seek cheaper care outside of the local jurisdiction. The first case of patient mobility is well established among Irish citizens who have in recent years increasingly availed of private medical services in Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Poland for non-basic dental care and cosmetic surgery (Gilmartin and White 2011). To our knowledge, private insurance companies do not (yet) openly encourage patients to seek cheaper treatment but many insurance plans allow patients to obtain treatment outside of the Republic subject to prior approval.…”

“…Patient mobility has mostly been discussed in terms of women traveling to Ireland to give birth 1 (White and Gilmartin 2008), or in terms of Irish residents traveling abroad to avail of cheaper health care (Gilmartin and White 2011). Travel from Ireland by recent migrants, for the purposes of health care, rarely features in these discussions.…”

“…Both types of cases are reported for Ireland. For instance, the Republic of Ireland prohibits abortion, and so thousands of women access this procedure annually in the UK and other European countries (Gilmartin and White 2011). The National Treatment Purchase Fund occasionally sends patients abroad for treatment if waiting times are excessive in Ireland.…”

Transnational Body Projects: Media Representations of Cosmetic Surgery Tourism in Argentina and the United States

“…In scholarship on medical tourism, some have objected to the term "tourism" to describe people seeking fertility treatment or other types of medical services (Martin 2009;Bergmann 2011;Gilmartin and White 2011;Kangas 2011). We use the terms tourism and patient-tourists to emphasize the international travel aspect of CST, the elective nature of the surgeries, and the cultural fantasies about destinations that may affect travelers' expectations.…”