Introduction

Medical tourism is a multi-billion pound industry that has seen substantial growth over the last 15 years (Horsfall and Lunt, 2015a). As a process it has been the focus of wide-ranging, business, political, academic and, intermittently, media interest. Early media references to medical tourism were often either to highlight the novelty of travel as an option for those seeking care (BBC, 2004; The Independent, 2008; Francis, 2011), decry the state of a National Health Service (NHS) so stretched that people felt the need to travel (Gregory, 2013; Buckland, 2015; Burman, 2015), inform readers of the risks associated with travelling for health through tales of ‘medical tourism gone wrong’ (Lakhani, 2010; Topham, 2013; BBC, 2014; Pietras, 2014), or highlight how these risks ultimately fell on the NHS when corrective procedures were needed (Smith, 2008; Triggle, 2008). More recently, media coverage of medical tourism has adopted the narrative of benefit fraud or exploitation, with tourists either purposely or unwittingly accessing care they are not entitled to or not paying for that which they are required to pay (Doughty, 2011; Adams, 2012; DoH, 2013; Kovacevic, 2016; McDermott and Wooller, 2016). This issue has proven particularly incendiary, prompting formal responses from the government, including the establishment of an NHS visitor and migrant cost recovery programme (DoH, 2014), an NHS levy on non-European Economic Area (EEA) migrants who enter the UK (NAO, 2016; The Telegraph, 2016) and a requirement for those seeking treatment to produce their passports (Syal and Campbell, 2016). In the lead-up to and aftermath of the UK's European Union (EU) referendum the issue played a central role in wider discussions around migration and the free movement of individuals across Europe (see Kovacevic, 2016).

For those with an interest in medical tourism, especially from a social or public policy perspective, this medical tourism as a form of benefit fraud discourse is both strange and frustrating. Medical tourism researchers are likely to find this perspective strange as it is one that is almost completely lacking from the literature on medical tourism. This is of course not to say that it is not happening, rather that it has garnered no real attention.