Care Abroad

Care AbroadStories (11)

Longer pieces: whether it is cheaper, who really travels, what the numbers cannot see.

Essays (6)

Circumvention

doing lawfully elsewhere what is prohibited at home, the residence gate

Travelling to a country where a treatment is lawful because it is prohibited at home. The act is legal where it happens; the traveller's own state mostly does not reach it.

Counting patients

how many people actually travel, the volume numbers

Why the headline figures for how many people travel for treatment cannot be added, compared or trusted as counts of people. Twelve of the 52 country records on this site carry an inbound figure.

Is it cheaper

the price comparison, worked, one knee, two prices

One operation, two published prices, worked to the end. A Bangkok hospital's knee package set against an English provider's self-pay list price for the same operation, with the implant, the nights past the package, the…

The follow-up nobody books

who takes the stitches out, where the bill for the second operation lands

The operation is bought in one country and its consequences are managed in another.

The queue is the product

waiting lists, the wait

Half this directory is about money and the other half is about law, and both miss the commonest reason a person with an insured, funded, free-at-the-point-of-use operation available to them gets on a plane anyway: the…

Who travels

the flows that are actually documented, against the brochure picture

The largest flows anyone counts are not Europeans and North Americans buying cheaper surgery.

Explainers (3)

The accreditation question

who inspects the inspector, reading a badge wall

An accreditation is a fact about an inspection somebody bought. The organisation applies, the organisation pays, the survey is scheduled, and the mark runs for a fixed term.

The price that isn't

the exclusion list, what a package leaves out

A published price covers a named list of things and excludes another named list, and across 214 price rows on this site the second list is longer than the first 68 times.

The word itself

why this site says medical travel, the naming rule

This site writes medical travel and cross-border care. The more familiar compound appears only inside a quotation with a speaker attached, inside a proper name, or on the word's own page, where the argument over it is…

Method (1)

How this was built

the method, rebuilding this directory

The record shape, the provenance tiers, the price rule, the law rule, the harvests and their licences, the map projection and the editorial rules — set out so that somebody with none of these files could build the same…

Where it came from (1)

What the data cannot see

the does-not-count sentences, the inventory of the hole

Thirteen published series supply every chart, map and table on this site. Each has a record, and each record carries one sentence stating what the series does not count. This page collects those thirteen sentences.

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