Domestic medical tourists from north-east to south India: An ethnographic investigation

The practice of travelling from one country to another in need of healthcare has existed in the world since the ancient period. The nature, trend, and dimension of healthcare travel have been changing in the 21st century with the influence of dynamic advanced technology and this phenomenon popular as medical tourism. Domestic medical tourism is a part of medical tourism, where the activities of intra-regional medical tourists are bounded within their country. Domestic medical tourism is apparent in a large country like India. North Eastern Region (NER) is an important part of India which is made up of eight small states. Residents of NER flock to different parts of the country as domestic medical tourists due to the scarcity of healthcare infrastructure and services. This study focused on those NER residents who visited three major hospitals in Tamil Nadu. We try to analyze push and pull healthcare motivation factors and simultaneously evaluate the travel experience of north eastern domestic medical tourists. The study was adopted as cross-sectional where 110 respondents were conducted for face-to-face interviews from May 2019 to June 2019