An article by Steven Tucker, President of the International Medical Travel Association
The International Medical Travel Association (IMTA) brings
together the healthcare and travel industries to help create a high-quality,
ethical and economically sustainable medical-travel industry as well as to
preserve and protect the doctor-patient relationship, all in the interests of
the international patient.
The IMTA seeks to represent the interests of medical
travellers and the medical-travel industry including both the healthcare
providers and those who facilitate medical travel. As global healthcare choices
expand, patients will increasingly travel across the world for access to better
and more affordable healthcare.
The IMTA works to promote and protect the safety and
well-being of patients (medical travellers) through the development of industry
networks, creation and distribution of knowledge, sharing of best practices,
establishment of standards and eventually accreditation with industry
self-regulation.
The members come from an array of countries such as the US,
Australia, the UK, Turkey, India, Nigeria, UAE, Malaysia, Thailand and
Singapore, representing various medical travel-related sectors like healthcare
providers, travel agents, medical concierges, publishers of medical travel
publications, national tourism offices, insurance companies and media
companies.
Medical travel encompasses a number of different phenomena,
from elective surgery, to medical travel. A patient might travel from North
America to Asia for a purely elective
procedure as part of a holiday or even have the procedure attached to a
holiday. Alternatively, a patient can travel from Bangladesh
to Singapore
for a second opinion on metastatic breast cancer. The industry needs to be
flexible enough to deal with, support and care for not just these scenarios,
but a thousand others.
The IMTA aims to begin brokering the discussion among all
the parties involved in medical travel. We want to discover where the industry
needs to strengthen patient care and assign specific responsibilities to the
individuals involved in global medical travel. We have to respect patients’
rights, and both patients and doctors need to understand that medicine is
fraught with complications. Making medical travel a tourism product in the
traditional sense is not the aim of the IMTA. These are serious medical
procedures.
Through education, patients are going to learn where quality
medical care occurs.
Unfortunately, developing nations still do not have adequate
resources for contemporary healthcare in the fields of cardiology, oncology and
other specialties. As a result, patients need to travel to get access to
quality health care. An important goal is to assist developing countries in
providing both access to quality and affordable health care and helping in its
development.
This entails codifying medical resources, taking control of
patient flow and helping facilities in those countries on how to best provide
care that will allow providers and the travel industry to begin to move more of
the resources currently used in sending patients abroad back to the local
environment.
In an ideal world, it would be better for all patients to be
treated as close to home as possible.
It should be recognised that in the short term, medical
travel entails patients travelling out of their own community to seek medical
help in another country, for various reasons; but a long-term aim should be for
care to be put back into the local environment so that not only can those
companion travellers and carers continue to work, but hospitals will be able to
create infrastructure and bring value to and benefit the local community.
A final aim, therefore, is to use medical travel today as a
mechanism for diffusing quality health care globally for tomorrow. I hope you
will join us in helping to make the IMTA a success for the future.
Membership enquiries, contact
Felicia Tan (felicia_tan@stb.gov.sg)
