Medical tourism has been on a rapid rise in the last decade, in Europe as well as globally. Governments and the business sector have started to acknowledge its potential impact on economic development and the development of tourism, but also on healthcare expenditure and on equity in access to health services in both countries of origin and countries of destination of patients. The potential of health tourism in the EU has recently been evaluated, and Romania has been seen by several analysists and actors in the sector as a location with an important potential of growth of medical tourism services. Research on this phenomenon did not, however, keep the pace with the dynamics of the sector, as up to now few studies have dealt with medical tourism in Romania. The paper seeks to respond to this knowledge gap by engaging in the mapping of this phenomenon, its potential directions of development and the challenges with which it is currently confronted.
Most existing studies on medical tourism in Europe have adopted a normative and individualist approach, seeing it as the result of explicit and defined choices made by patients. Qualitative studies on the cross-border mobility have, however, shown that many times patients invoke a multiplicity of motives and adopt a multiplicity of pathways to access health services, including services offered outside their countries of residence. By drawing on these studies, our paper seeks to develop a larger perspective on medical tourism, one which considers it as a social phenomenon involving a series of social actors and processes. In this paper we will concentrate on processes of institutionalisation currently at work in the field of medical tourism in Romania, most notably by documenting attempts at regulating and configuring the field in networks of power relations between its various actors.