Focus on Barbados’ medical tourism
Wednesday March 30 2011 | 04:15 AM

Barbados' medical tourism thrust is to be focus of major study.

A team of researchers led by Jeremy Snyder, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Canada's Simon Fraser University will be in the island late next month to examine the extent to which Canadians are travelling here for health reasons.

The project is called Medical Tourism in a Developing Market: Toward a Canada-Barbados Research Agenda, and has six team members who will question a number of individuals in Barbados before compiling a report.

"The goals of this research development project are to ... hold a series of face-to-face meetings with researchers, decision-makers, and stakeholders to learn more about the Barbadian context of medical tourism and assess the potential for new research collaborations, tour medical tourism facilities in Barbados with potential research collaborators to aid in the planning of new, collaborative research regarding medical tourism," an outline of the project stated.

Other aims included determining the existing and planned regulatory procedures aimed at addressing the positive and negative effects of medical tourism in Barbados, identifying specific meaningful future research questions and objectives, and "enhancing trainee capacity through the planning of this research collaboration".

Snyder has been writing various groups in Barbados inviting them to be part of the research.

"As you may know, international patients, including Canadians, are travelling to Barbados to engage in medical tourism," he said.

"Many questions are raised by this process, including what steps Barbados has taken to encourage and regulate this industry, how this industry has developed in Barbados, what effects this industry is having in Barbados, how many Canadians are travelling to Barbados and for what procedures, and whether Canadians are investing in the medical tourism industry in Barbados."

Interviews of "medical tourism stakeholders" will take place between April 26 and May 2 by the SFU Medical Tourism Research Group.

The SFU team said it was generally interested in Canadians' travel for elective surgeries that do not involve purchased human organs.

"The practice of medical tourism raises important questions for the safety of patients, creates uncertainties about impacts on patients' home countries and destination countries, and creates ethical issues both for people who have and have not participated in medical tourism," it said on its Website.

"Our research team is interested in each of these issues. For example, we want to understand the implications of health and safety issues in medical tourism for patients' decision-making and physicians' involvement in the process of decision-making. We are also interested in identifying pressing ethical issues in the practice of medical tourism and their local and global outcomes.