What does the development of medical tourism in Barbados hold for health equity? an exploratory qualitative case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although the global growth of privatized health care services in the form of medical tourism appears to generate economic benefits, there is debate about medical tourism's impacts on health equity in countries that receive medical tourists. Studies of the processes of economic globalization in relation to social determinants of health suggest that medical tourism's impacts on health equity can be both direct and indirect. Barbados, a small Caribbean nation which has universal public health care, private sector health care and a strong tourism industry, is interested in developing an enhanced medical tourism sector. In order to appreciate Barbadians' understanding of how a medical tourism industry might impact health equity. METHODS: We conducted 50 individual and small-group interviews in Barbados with stakeholders including government officials, business and health professionals. The interviews were coded and analyzed deductively using the schedule's questions, and inductively for novel findings, and discussed by the authors. RESULTS: The findings suggest that in spite of Barbados' universal health care and strong population health indicators, there is expressed concern for medical tourism's impact on health equity. Informants pointed to the direct ways in which the domestic population might access more health care through medical tourism and how privately-provided medical tourism in Barbados could provide health benefits indirectly to the Barbadian populations. At the same time, they cautioned that these benefits may not materialize. For example, the transfer of public resources - health workers, money, infrastructure and equipment - to the private sector to support medical tourism with little to no return to government revenues could result in health inequity through reductions in access to and availability of health care for residents. CONCLUSIONS: In clarifying the direct and indirect pathways by which medical tourism can impact health equity, these findings have implications for health system stakeholders and decision-makers in Barbados and other countries attempting both to build a medical tourism industry and to protect health equity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".