Medical Tourism Isn’t All Faulty Breast Implants and NHS Funds

July 31, 2014

(The Conversation) – Medical tourism has received mixed coverage in mainstream media – it gains notoriety when patients travel and experience complications as a result of receiving treatment abroad. The PIP breast implant scandal, for example, brought issues with medical tourism to light after many women had the faulty implants as cosmetic surgery tourists. More recently, the UK government chose to highlight so-called “health tourism” in its Immigration Bill. Health tourism in this context has been described as a kind of welfare scrounging where patients come to the UK and covertly try to access free NHS treatment that they are not entitled to.