Being a patient is possibly never easy. In the vast majority of cases, it is – at best – an inconvenient situation to be in. This unease might well be intensified if someone is seeing a doctor abroad in an unfamiliar setting. What are the obstacles a border-crossing patient faces and how can these barriers be overcome? These are the questions which particularly fascinated me during the years of my research. My ambition was to detect and to bring a better understanding of those legal issues which are potentially problematic when obtaining healthcare abroad and to examine whether these can be solved with the legal tools currently available on the European level. The main question behind this research was how the current landscape of European cross-border patient mobility legislation can be improved in a way that better serves patients’ interests while respecting the responsibilities of the Member States in this field.

Principally, this book aims to analyse the European legal framework governing cross-border patient movements from a strictly patient-centred approach. I confess that as a social lawyer, my main interest is the social status of the individual.