Promoting medical tourism to India: Messages, images, and the marketing of international patient travel

Abstract

The practice of medical tourism depends on successfully informing potential patients about procedure options, treatment facilities, tourism opportunities, travel arrangements, and destination countries. The promotion of medical tourism includes a wide range of marketing materials such as flyers, booklets, and websites. Yet, there is a paucity of knowledge about the dissemination, content, and reception of these promotional materials. Drawing on a thematic content analysis of the promotional print material distributed at the first medical tourism trade show in Canada in 2009, the main purpose of this article is to identify and understand the messages and images that companies use to market India as a global destination. While researchers and news media frequently cite low cost procedures as a key determinant for international patient travel, particularly to developing nations, our analysis reveals few low costrelated images or messages in the promotional materials distributed at the trade show. To help explain this surprising disjuncture, we consider four related issues: (1) promotional materials may be designed to be circulated amongst potential patients' concerned family and friends who privilege knowing about things such as the use of advanced technologies; (2) developing nations need to portray safe and advanced treatment facilities in order to dispel potential patients' suspicions that their medical care is inferior; (3) companies may avoid making cost saving claims that cannot be fulfilled for all of their international patients, especially those traveling from developing nations; and (4) messages of low cost may detract from and even undermine messages about quality. We conclude by identifying numerous avenues for future research by social and health scientists, and by considering the implications of our findings for existing knowledge gaps and debates within health geography specifically.

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

“…While there is no significant correlation found between two independent variables, direct effects were pointed out between observed and latent variables in this study. Previous literature showed a strong relationship between motivational factor and perceived quality [4]. Tourists that are highly motivated to travel to the chosen destination might perceive the service quality higher that who are not.…”

“…For travellers that travel overseas for medical purposes, conceptually, they would meet the definition of a tourist. Since medical tourists are travelers whose main motivation for travel is for a specific purpose, medical tourists can be categorized as a group of special interest tourists, hence participating in a form of special interest tourism [4]. Medical tourism does not refer to care given when one happens to have a health emergency while abroad, as intent is key: the patient must actually intend to go elsewhere for care.…”

“…According to a research of Crooks et al [4], push and pull factors incorporate service quality attributes of the medical service providers at the destination, along with the destination perception, process of travel and medical tourism experience as a whole. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: H1: Motivational factors have significant effect on the perceived quality of the medical treatment at the destination.…”

“…Medical tourism combines medicine with tourism, encouraging patients to seek medical services while traveling for relaxation and leisure and have emerged as one of the fastest growing areas of academic research interest in both tourism and health studies [4]. Smith and Puczko [5] argue that health tourism is composed of medical tourism and wellness tourism, meaning that medical tourism is a subset of health tourism.…”

“…Furthermore, some researches focused on pull and push factor on destination choice behavior. [4][5][6]9,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”