Irving Stackpole RRT, MEd | published in Omnia Health |Jun 08, 2023
Research shows that improving transitions of care significantly reduces hospital readmissions and improves outcomes.
People enjoy travelling to explore destinations or visit friends and relatives. Healthy travellers may catch a cold or acquire an infection. Most often, these travel-related illnesses are not serious. Medical travellers, or individuals that are travelling to receive healthcare outside their usual place of residence, often cross an international border to receive care while they are medically compromised. Travel for them is inherently riskier than the average tourist.
In search of a cure
Approximately two million people annually travel to receive medical treatment, i.e., secondary, tertiary, or quaternary medical care. In addition to these medical travellers, an additional 225,000 to 500,000 people travel for elective “lifestyle” procedures, often involving surgical procedures to non-hospital settings such as clinics. In general, approximately 5.5 million medical-related trips take place every year; about 0.2 per cent of all people who travel internationally.
People enjoy travelling to explore destinations or visit friends and relatives. Healthy travellers may catch a cold or acquire an infection. Most often, these travel-related illnesses are not serious. Medical travellers, or individuals that are travelling to receive healthcare outside their usual place of residence, often cross an international border to receive care while they are medically compromised. Travel for them is inherently riskier than the average tourist.
In search of a cure
Approximately two million people annually travel to receive medical treatment, i.e., secondary, tertiary, or quaternary medical care. In addition to these medical travellers, an additional 225,000 to 500,000 people travel for elective “lifestyle” procedures, often involving surgical procedures to non-hospital settings such as clinics. In general, approximately 5.5 million medical-related trips take place every year; about 0.2 per cent of all people who travel internationally.
When medical travel goes wrong
Medical travellers go from their place of residence to another destination location for treatment and then return home. The patient journey for these individuals may require that the home medical providers communicate with the destination providers to coordinate the care for the patient on the outbound and return journeys.
When patients change from one healthcare provider to another, these shifts are commonly referred to in the healthcare profession as “transitions of care”. Adding travel to the patient treatment plan increases the risk of miscommunication both in both documentation as well as clinical care. Because there are more handovers among providers, the likelihood of human error increases, generating more gaps in the transitions of care and increasing risk to the patient.
The peer-reviewed research into negative outcomes for medical travellers has focused on small numbers of people, cataloguing their complications. The reporting biases are that healthcare abroad is dangerous, a bad idea and that off-shore providers are less competent.