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

Transnational medical travel – the temporary movement by patients across national borders in order to address medical concerns abroad that are (considered to be) unable to be sufficiently met within their countries of residence – is an important therapeutic coping strategy used by growing proportions of peoples with a diverse range of mobility profiles and intensities of global moorings. Studying this phenomenon provides useful insight into a rapidly globalising era of health governance, where an ever-wider array of state and non-state actors are transcending the increasingly restrictive national containerisations of health care and engaging in cross-border action to effectively address contemporary health challenges at both individual and collective levels. In our introduction to this special issue on transnational medical travel, we draw on both ‘medical tourism’ and migrant health scholarship to acknowledge the diversity of motivations among migrant and non-migrant patients alike and the complex nature of mobile patients’ attachments to the multiple places in which they seek care. We then bring attention to how dynamic structural issues in mobile patients’ countries of residence and destination shape their attachments to places and health systems over time, examining the linkages between vitality of the political and social systems in these places to which they are differently attached and their dis/satisfaction and dis/enfranchisement with them.