The Wrong Prescription: The Place of Medical Tourism Amid a Global Pandemic.
Cruise ships were left adrift in the Caribbean when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Ports were closed, airliners were grounded, and the medical tourism industry found itself short on patients. Medical tourism can be understood as the coordination of travel with the receipt of medical care for patients who elect to seek coverage abroad. The World Bank, and other development organizations, have encouraged medical tourism as means for greater economic diversification. Dr. Valorie Crooks chats with Dr. Bob Huish about why that diversification may be limited at best, and how the COVID-19 not only ground the medical tourism to a halt, but called the whole thing into question. Medical tourism may have promised better health care to a global community, but the COVID-19 pandemic showed the true limits of the industry. Dr. Valorie Crooks completed her PhD at McMaster University in 2005. The following year she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at York University. Since 2006 she has been a faculty member in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Crooks currently hold the Canada Research Chair in Health Service Geographies and she also holds a Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Dr. Crooks is a health geographer by training. As such, she is interested in the spatial and place-based dimensions of health and health care. She broadly conceives of herself as a health services researcher, and have an ongoing interest in understanding lived experiences of accessing needed/wanted health and social care services. Because of this experiential focus, she primarily engages in non-hypothesis-testing qualitative research, or lead qualitative components of mixed-methods studies. Her research interests are best characterized by four areas of inquiry: (1) disability and chronic illness; (2) primary health care; (3) palliative health and social care; and (4) medical tourism. She has received funding from numerous agencies, and especially the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, to pursue collaborative projects in each of these areas. Follow Dr. Bob on Twitter: @ProfessorHuish