This book analyses the development of international medical travel in Malaysia. It challenges embedded assumptions about the sources, directions and political value of care. The author situates the Malaysian case study material at the fruitful cross-section of a range of literatures such as international medical travel (IMT); the role of cross-border mobility in the construction of identity; care and hospitality; therapeutic landscapes; place-branding and medical diplomacy.

International medical travel (IMT), people crossing national borders in the pursuit of healthcare, has become a growing phenomenon. With many of the countries currently being promoted as IMT destinations located in the ‘developing’ world, IMT poses a significant challenge to popular assumptions about who provides and receives care since it inverses and diversifies presumed directionalities of care. This book analyses the development of international medical travel in Malaysia, by looking at the benefits and challenges of providing health care to non-Malaysians. It challenges embedded assumptions about the sources, directions and political value of care. The author situates the Malaysian case study material at the fruitful cross-section of a range of literatures on transnational mobility, hospitality, therapeutic landscapes and medical diplomacy to examine their roles in the construction of national identity. The book thus contributes to wider debates that have emerged around the changing character of global health governance, and is of use to students and scholars of Southeast Asian Studies as well as Politics and Health and Social Care.

Tourism has become increasingly shaped by neoliberal policies, yet the consequences of this neoliberalisation are relatively under-explored. This book provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the particular manifestations of different variants of neoliberalism, highlighting its uneven geographical development and the changing dynamics of neoliberal policies in order to explain and evaluate the effects of neoliberal processes on tourism. Covering a variety of different aspects of neoliberalism and tourism, the chapters investigate how different types of tourism are used as part of more general neoliberalisation agendas, how neoliberalism differs according to the geographic context, the importance of discourse in shaping neoliberal practices and the different approaches of putting the neoliberal ideology into practice. Aiming to initiate debates about the connections between neoliberalism and tourism and advance further research avenues, this book makes a timely contribution which discusses the relationships between markets, nation-states and societies from a social science perspective. Neoliberalism is considered as a political-economic ideology, as variants of the global neoliberal project, as discourse and practices through which neoliberalism is enacted.

Through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, and with an emphasis on exploring patterns as well as distinct and unique conditions across the globe, this collection examines advanced and cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the health of urban populations. Despite the growing interest in global urban health, there are limited resources available that provide an extensive and advanced exploration into the health of urban populations in a transnational context. This volume offers a high-quality and comprehensive examination of global urban health issues by leading urban health scholars from around the world. The book brings together a multi-disciplinary perspective on urban health, with chapter contributions emphasizing disciplines in the social sciences, construction sciences and medical sciences. The co-editors of the collection come from a number of different disciplinary backgrounds that have been at the forefront of urban health research, including public health, epidemiology, geography, city planning and urban design. The book is intended to be a reference in global urban health for research libraries and faculty collections. It will also be appropriate as a text for university class adoption in upper-division under-graduate courses and above. The proposed volume is extensive and offers enough breadth and depth to enable it to be used for courses emphasizing a U.S., or wider Western perspective, as well as courses on urban health emphasizing a global context.

This edited volume explores the interconnection between care work, travel, and healthcare, emphasizing the emotional dimensions of seeking care away from home. It brings together contributions from disciplines such as anthropology, nursing, primary care, sociology and geography and covers experiences of medical travel and other forms of remote care in the United States, Laos, India, Italy, France, Finland, Switzerland, and Russia.

The growth of international travel for purposes of medical treatment has been accompanied by increased academic research and analysis. This Handbook explores the emergence of medical travel and patient mobility and the implications for patients and hea

Health Care Social Work aims to directly empower health care social workers around the world by providing valuable new information about the breadth and depth of the profession's health care contributions, legislative and policy influences upon practice, and implications for future practice and growth in different nations. Written by scholars and practitioners of health care social work from around the world, chapters encourage comparative analysis of distant health care social work practice as a means of supporting meaningful change on a local level and contributing to public health in a way that transcends boundaries and makes a difference globally. Readers will gain an opportunity to examine their assumptions about health care social work practice and reflect meaningfully upon less familiar techniques and approaches as a way of prompting problem-solving with an expanded frame of reference.

Housing more than half of the global population, Asia is a region characterised by increasingly diverse forms of migration and mobility. Offering a wide-ranging overview of the field of Asian migrations, this new handbook therefore seeks to examine and evaluate the flows of movement within Asia, as well as into and out of the continent. Through in-depth analysis of both empirical and theoretical developments in the field, it includes key examples and trends such as British colonialism, Chinese diaspora, labour migration, the movement of women, and recent student migration. Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover: The historical context to migration in Asia Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practice and policy Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian Studies in general.

The places of our daily life affect our health, well-being, and receipt of health care in complex ways. The connection between health and place has been acknowledged for centuries, and the contemporary discipline of health geography sets as its core mission to uncover and explicate all facets of this connection. The Routledge Handbook of Health Geography features 52 chapters from leading international thinkers that collectively characterize the breadth and depth of current thinking on the health–place connection. It will be of interest to students seeking an introduction to health geography as well as multidisciplinary health scholars looking to explore the intersection between health and place. This book provides a coherent synthesis of scholarship in health geography as well as multidisciplinary insights into cutting-edge research. It explores the key concepts central to appreciating the ways in which place influences our health, from the micro-space of the body to the macro-scale of entire world regions, in order to articulate historical and contemporary aspects of this influence.

This book examines the global influence and scope of medical tourism with an emphasis on the city of Kolkata in Eastern India as an emerging destination at the regional scale. Through a geographical research perspective, the book discusses the importance of the phenomenon of medical tourism including recent trends, policies, and scale studies to develop sustainable strategies for medical tourism at particular micro destinations. In nine chapters, readers will become familiar with the multi-billion dollar industry of medical tourism and the problems currently associated with medical tourism at multiple scales. The trends of medical tourism in and around the city of Kolkata are used to demonstrate the roles of infrastructure and stakeholders in implementing feasible and sustainable medical tourism in an emerging destination. The first two chapters of the book provide an introduction to medical tourism and the methodologies of this study. Then chapters three through nine focus on medical tourism in the case of Kolkata to discuss the regional applications and developments of medical tourism. Topics addressed include medical tourism facilities, stakeholders and tourists, guest-host relationships, an assessment of development versus risk, and an evaluation of strategies to manage rising medical tourism in Kolkata. The concluding chapter discusses future strategies that could be used to implement the potentialities of a metropolitan city as a medical tourism destination, based on studies done in Kolkata. Readers who will find this work of interest include students, practitioners, geographers, and researchers and policymakers engaged in the medical tourism industry.