Ethical Issues and Organizations

Now I would like to talk about some ethical issues involved in delivering medical tourism. It is sometimes controversial involving organ transplants, sometimes refer as to organ trafficking. So I think government needs to have special safeguards to prevent abuses when it comes to organ transplants.

Some countries also experiences childbirths for residency purposes. This is also not desirable. People are going there not because of the quality of care, but because they want to obtain residency for the new born babies. This is also something which government needs to be aware of. And thirdly ,government needs to ensure that the development of medical tourism would not deprive local residents of their needed care that they are entitled to. Some studies have indicated that for some countries where medical tourism is quite common, then access of care by local residents has been compromised because of that. So there need to be some safeguards for local residents, before one should develop medical tourism in a major way.

There are now currently a number of medical tourism organizations to support the development of medical tourism. The first type are actually general hospital accreditation organizations. The accredit hospitals are not particularly or especially for medical tourism, but for hospitals in general. Originally, these accreditation bodies accredit local hospitals. But increasingly we find that these bodies are also willing to accredit hospitals in foreign countries. Commonly use accreditation organizations are the Joint Commission International or sometimes known as the JCI, which is in an American hospital accreditation body. Accreditation Canada is the Canadian equivalent. Trent accreditation scheme is the UK accreditation body. There are also medical tourism facilitators satisfacation programme. The medical tourism association now trained and certified medical tourism facilitators.

These are professionals which can help coordinate a patients trip to another country for a medical care. And finally we are now have medical travel quality alliance certification. This is a type of accreditation which is conducted not just on general hospital accreditation, but they would look at how these hospitals, these facilities would coordinate medical travel. So this is something which is particularly unique for hospitals, which seeks to promote medical tourism.

To recap in this lecture, we discussed what is and what is not medical tourism, the types of medical tourism, why is it so important for many governments, the trends of tourism. We also discussed the supply chain of the medical industry. We explore the common reasons for medical travel, the common procedures, the top destination for medical tourism, We also look at the different models of medical tourism practice in different countries. The keys success factors for each model and some ethical considerations. I hope you find this lecture useful and interesting. Thank you.