Transnational medical travel: patient mobility, shifting health system entitlements and attachments

Transnational medical travel–the temporary movement by patientsacross national borders in order to address medical concerns abroadthat are (considered to be) unable to be sufficiently met within theircountries of residence–is an important therapeutic coping strategyused by growing proportions of peoples with a diverse range ofmobility profiles and intensities of global moorings. Studying thisphenomenon provides useful insight into a rapidly globalising eraof health governance, where an ever-wider array of state and non-state actors are transcending the increasingly restrictive nationalcontainerisations of health care and engaging in cross-borderaction to effectively address contemporary health challenges atboth individual and collective levels. In our introduction to thisspecial issue on transnational medical travel, we draw on both‘medical tourism’and migrant health scholarship to acknowledgethe diversity of motivations among migrant and non-migrantpatients alike and the complex nature of mobile patients’attachments to the multiple places in which they seek care. Wethen bring attention to how dynamic structural issues in mobilepatients’countries of residence and destination shape theirattachments to places and health systems over time, examiningthe linkages between vitality of the political and social systems inthese places to which they are differently attached and their dis/satisfaction and dis/enfranchisement with them.