India is now in the elite club. It has been ranked 5th in global research publication output where countries from North America, the European and Pacific hold the roost, both in terms of quantitative and qualitative research, which has been mentioned by a joint study by Council of Scientific & Industrial Research—National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies (CSIR- NISTADS) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER).
The US heads the table by being the most productive country in health tourism research. Other countries to be ranked in the top 10 in 2007-16 were UK (12.59% share), Canada (7.45%), Australia (7.10%), India (3.45%) and Germany (3.38%), Italy, Spain, France and Netherlands (from 2.53% to 2.95%) during 2007-16.
With an objective to study the performance of global medical tourism research in last 10 years, researchers retrieved and downloaded 10-year publication data on world output in health tourism from the Scopus database, covering the period 2007-2016. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature—scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
IT’LL HELP IN STUDYING THE PERFORMANCE OF GLOBAL MEDICAL TOURISM
“India also holds a position of honor by being ranked second as medical tourism destination in the world after Thailand. It proudly plays the host to about 150,000 medical tourists annually, and this number is expected to grow 15% every year. In order to help India perform better on qualitative front, it is necessary that the stakeholders in India should prioritize research in this area and at the same time promote international collaborative research.
However, a wide variety of services can be obtained through medical tourism, ranging from various essential treatments to different kinds of traditional and alternative treatments. Reproductive tourism and reproductive outsourcing are gaining momentum, which is the practice of travelling to India to engage in surrogate pregnancy, in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology methods.
The most common types of procedures that patients opt for during their medical tourism trips are elective cosmetic surgery, dentistry, organ transplantation, cardiac surgery and orthopaedic surgery.
