Abstract
Traveling abroad to seek healthcare services for medical or wellness purposes is a global phenomenon since the start of the 21st century. However, since the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation in 2020, due to pandemic related regulations, travel restrictions, and grounded airlines, traveling for health reasons has been negatively impacted, resulting in a decline in demand for overseas travel and healthcare services. There is now a pent-up demand by consumers to travel abroad for health tourism to countries such as Thailand, India, and Turkey. At the same time with opening borders and airline-travel resumed, countries cannot be complacent about health-risk involved. Therefore, safety and wellbeing of the health tourists during and post-pandemic under the new-normal paradigm is important.
TopIntroduction
In the 20th century, affluent patients from developing countries use to travel to developed countries for complex surgeries. This tread has been reversed, in the 21st century due to ease of travel and globalisation, and now millions of global patients travel abroad every year for wellness and medical tourism, leading to a development of increasing number of state-of-the-art super speciality private hospitals treating foreign patients in popular wellness and medical tourism destinations in developing countries (Bookman & Bookman, 2007; Medhekar, 2012). However, since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, by the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2020), due to pandemic related regulations, travel restrictions, grounded airlines and supply chain disruptions in healthcare and pharmaceutical goods, there has been a decline in demand for overseas travel and healthcare services. Under the ‘New-Normal’ situation and post-Pandemic, demand for health tourism is gradually increasing, with international travel resumed, potential medical tourists who have been waiting for the last 2.5 years are now taking the risk of travelling for wellness and medical purposes to improve their physical health and wellbeing.
Since the pandemic in 2020, health tourism sector can be divided into pre- and post-COVID era (Sharma et al., 2018). Prime Minster of India, in order to attract global foreign investment in health tourism, announced the ‘Heal in India’ brand, and about “India becoming a medical tourism hub for the world, servicing and saving millions of lives each year” of international patients from the neighbouring countries and the world given the potential for foreign exchange earnings and job creation in various sectors of the economy, related to medical and health tourism (Ahmed, 2022). Potential patients seek medical treatment abroad from developed countries of Canada, Europe, UK, and USA, is due to patients being uninsured, or underinsured for certain procedures such as cosmetic, high health insurance premium, increasing surgical costs, long waiting period for elective surgeries, privacy and confidentiality and certain procedures are not available in their home country due to ethical reasons and government regulations (Collins et al., 2022; Deloitte, 2008; Horowitz & Rosensweig, 2007). Choice of medical facility and country is impacted by cost, quality of pre-post-surgery care, highly skilled physicians, surgeons, and nurses, international accreditation of medical facilities, and less waiting time; besides local infrastructure, economic and political stability, tourism/sightseeing opportunities if health permits, and regulatory policies influencing the patient’s choice of specific country for treatment (Collins et al., 2022; Medhekar & Wong, 2020).
The purpose of this chapter is to: (i) Examine the literature and significance of health tourism development and promotion in context of India. (ii) Evaluate the challenges and opportunities faced by the Indian health tourism industry (iii) Propose a Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) framework for pandemic resilient health tourism. This paper aims to conceptualise the global trade in healthcare services which involves travelling abroad for healthcare in the ‘New-Normal’ environment; and future challenges and opportunities for sustainable health tourism development and promotion in India in particular and health tourism industry in general for its sustainable future.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Medical Travel/ Tourism: Medical travel/tourism where patients travel outside their place of residence within a country or overseas to seek medical treatment or surgery to improve once physical health and wellbeing.
Health Tourism: Health tourism covers travel activities of a tourists related to improving ones health. The person who travels for health primary motivation if to improve his/hers physical, mental, and spiritual, health through medical and wellness-based activities. Health truism has two branches: (i) wellness tourism and (ii) medical tourism.
Wellness Tourism: Wellness tourism is liked with alternative treatment or therapies like Yoga Ayurveda, and herbal remedies to improve one’s inner physical, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing and balance.
Epidemic: Epidemic is defined as a viral disease that affects a large population and spreads within a local region, community, or a specific geographical area in a country. Chickenpox, cholera, smallpox, polio, typhoid, yellow fever, and HIV are examples of an epidemic
New-Normal: New-Normal situation means that the current situation or regulatory customs followed due to the global pandemic have become a ‘New-Normal’ and a usual accepted situation. A pandemic like situation, which has been different, is now become a normal situation, as it is still going on for the last 3 years.
Pandemic: A pandemic is defined as a new virus disease that spreads around the globe in many countries and continents, creating global public health emergency. The World health organsiation declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on 11 th of March 2020. Examples of pandemic are H1N1 also known as swine flu (2009), SARS (2003) AU94: The in-text citation "SARS (2003)" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. , H3N2 (1968) known as Avian flu, H2N2 (1957) also known as Asian flu.