

transnational healthcare
How are the medical and long-term care needs of different transnationally-mobile populations being supported and met in an era of intensified global mobility?
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With this line of inquiry, I focus on how the medical and long-term care needs of different transnationally-mobile populations (e.g., economic migrants, retirement migrants and so-called 'medical tourists') are being supported and met in an era of intensified global mobility. My work examines the key trends challenging conventional nationally-containerised thinking about sources, directions, subjects and relations of care by paying attention to transnational configurations of formal (i.e., state, private and voluntary) and informal (i.e., family and community) care provision.
Publications & initiatives
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Ormond, M. (2021) 'Managing internationally mobile bodies in a world on hold: Migration, tourism and biological citizenship in the context of COVID-19'. In: Andrews, G.J., Crooks, V.A., Pearce, J.A. & Messina, J.P. (eds), COVID-19 and Similar Futures: Pandemic Geographies, Springer, 119-124.
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The novelty and severity of the virus and the ease with which COVID-19 is transmitted have led to far-reaching and unprecedented international travel restrictions. This chapter focuses on the ways in which national governments scrambled at a moment of unprecedented crisis to manage different forms of international mobility on which they have grown increasingly dependent over the last decades. It uses the concept of ‘biological citizenship’ as a lens through which to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic offers new perspective on age-old political dilemmas of controlling the spread of contagion and its management. Through that lens, the emergence of novel spatio-relational configurations of ‘biological trust’ in the form of bubbles, bridges, and corridors; biological risk loopholes legitimizing the resumed movement of ‘high value’-‘low volume’ flows; and biologically inclusive regularizations policies can be seen. The chapter argues for the need to make increasingly visible the ways in which our biological identities articulate with our political identities in a highly globalized world.​
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Ormond, M. (2021) 'Grenzen en biologisch burgerschap: internationaal toerisme en migratie in tijden van Covid-19', Vrijetijdstudies, 39(1), 13-17. ISSN 1384-2439. https://www.nritmedia.nl/kennisbank/43987/grenzen-en-biologisch-burgerschap-internationaal-toerisme-en-migratie-in-tijden-van-covid-19/?topicsid=
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Het nieuwe en ernstige karakter van het virus en het gemak waarmee Covid-19 wordt overgedragen, hebben geleid tot verreikende en ongekende internationale reisbeperkingen. Dit essay richt zich op de manieren waarop nationale regeringen tijdens het begin van de Covid-19 crisis de internationale mobiliteit, waarvan ze de afgelopen decennia steeds afhankelijker zijn geworden, in goede banen probeerde te leiden. Het artikel gebruikt het concept van ‘biologisch burgerschap’ als een lens om te onderzoeken hoe de Covid-19-pandemie een nieuw perspectief biedt op eeuwenoude politieke dilemma's van het in toom houden van de verspreiding van besmetting. Door die lens kan de opkomst van nieuwe ruimtelijke vertrouwensrelaties in de vorm van ‘bubbles’, luchtbruggen en verbindingscorridors worden gezien. Hier pleit ik voor de waarde van het steeds zichtbaarder maken van de manieren waarop onze biologische identiteit zich verhouden tot onze politieke identiteit in een steeds meer geglobaliseerde wereld.​
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Ormond, M. (2020) ‘International medical travel, or medical tourism’, in A. Kobayashi (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd Edition, London: Elsevier, 373-377. https://edepot.wur.nl/511093
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Each year, millions of people around the world, disenfranchised by the restrictive national laws and unresponsive health systems in their countries of residence, circumvent these barriers by travelling to countries where their desired medical treatment is more accessible to them. These patients’ international medical travels (IMT), sometimes referred to as “medical tourism,” have drawn popular, political, commercial and scholarly attention, first, to the diverse global patchwork of healthcare ideologies and practices; second, to the national containerization of health care; and, third, to the consequences of IMT in traveling patients’ source, transit and receiving countries.​
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Co-editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) special issue 'Transnational medical travel: Patient mobility, shifting health system entitlements and attachments' with Neil Lunt, 2019
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Ormond, M. and Lunt, N. (2020) ‘Transnational medical travel: Patient mobility, shifting health system entitlements and attachments’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(20), 4179-4192. [Open access]​ https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1597465
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​Transnational medical travel – the temporary movement by patients across national borders in order to address medical concerns abroad that are (considered to be) unable to be sufficiently met within their countries of residence – is an important therapeutic coping strategy used by growing proportions of peoples with a diverse range of mobility profiles and intensities of global moorings. Studying this phenomenon provides useful insight into a rapidly globalising era of health governance, where an ever-wider array of state and non-state actors are transcending the increasingly restrictive national containerisations of health care and engaging in cross-border action to effectively address contemporary health challenges at both individual and collective levels. In our introduction to this special issue on transnational medical travel, we draw on both ‘medical tourism’ and migrant health scholarship to acknowledge the diversity of motivations among migrant and non-migrant patients alike and the complex nature of mobile patients’ attachments to the multiple places in which they seek care. We then bring attention to how dynamic structural issues in mobile patients’ countries of residence and destination shape their attachments to places and health systems over time, examining the linkages between vitality of the political and social systems in these places to which they are differently attached and their dis/satisfaction and dis/enfranchisement with them.
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Ormond, M. and Nah, A.M. (2020) ‘Risk entrepreneurship and the construction of healthcare deservingness for “desirable”, “acceptable” and “disposable” migrants in Malaysia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(20), 4282-4302. [Open access] https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1597477
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In recent years, scholars have focused on the concept of healthcare deservingness, observing that healthcare professionals, state authorities and the broader public make moral judgements about which migrants are deserving of health care and which are not. Such literature tends to focus on migrants with irregular status. This article examines how state calculations of healthcare deservingness have also been applied to authorised migrants. Focusing on Malaysia, we examine the ways in which state authorities construct migrants as ‘desirable’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘disposable’, differentiated through calculations of their biological and economic risks and potential contribution to ‘the nation’. To do this, we analyse recent government and commercial policies, plans and practices to reflect on how such biopolitical orderings create the conditions for risk entrepreneurship – where public and private actors capitalise on profit-making opportunities that emerge from the construction of risky subjects and risky scenarios – while reinforcing hierarchies of healthcare deservingness that exacerbate health inequalities by privileging migrants with greater economic capital and legitimising the exclusion of poor migrants.​
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Ormond, M. and Kaspar, H. (2019) ‘Medical travel/tourism and the city’, in I. Vojnovic, A. Pearson, A. Gershim, A. Allen and G. de Verteuil (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Global Urban Health, Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN: 978-1138206250
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Ormond, M. and Kaspar, H. (2019) ‘South-South medical tourism’, in E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and P. Daley (eds), Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations, Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN: 9781317229148
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Ormond, M. and Toyota, M. (2018) ‘Rethinking care through transnational health and long-term care practices’, in V. Crooks, G. Andrews and J. Pearce (eds), Routledge Handbook of Health Geography, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 237-243.
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Ormond, M. and Lim, C.H. (2018) The Private Healthcare Sector in Johor: Trends and Prospects, Singapore: ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. https://www.iseas.edu.sg/images/pdf/TRS17_18.pdf[Open access]
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Moghavvemi, S., Ormond, M., Musa, G., Mohamed Isa, C.R., Thirumoorthi, T., bin Mustapha, M.Z., Kanapathy, K. and John Chiremel Chand, J. (2017) ‘Connecting with prospective medical tourists online: A cross-sectional analysis of private hospital websites promoting medical tourism in India, Malaysia and Thailand’, Tourism Management, 58, February, 154-163. DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2016.10.010
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Crooks, V.A., Ormond, M. and Jin, K.N. (2017) ‘Reflections on “medical tourism” from the 2016 Global Healthcare Policy and Management Forum’, BMC Proceedings, 11(Suppl 8):6, 1-4. [Open access]
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Ormond, M. and Sulianti, D. (2017) ‘More than medical tourism: Lessons from Indonesia and Malaysia on South-South intra-regional medical travel’, Current Issues in Tourism, 20(1), 94-110. DOI:10.1080/13683500.2014.937324
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Ormond, M., Chan, C.K. and Verghis, S. (2017) ‘Healthcare entitlements for citizens and trans-border mobile peoples in Southeast Asia’, in A. McGregor, L. Law and F. Miller (eds), Handbook of Southeast Asian Development¸ Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 186-197.
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Klijs, J., Ormond, M., Mainil, T., Peerlings, J. and Heijman, W. (2016) ‘A state-level analysis of the economic impacts of medical tourism in Malaysia’, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, 30:1, 1-26. DOI: 10.1111/apel.12132
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Ormond, M. (2016) ‘Knowledge transfer in the “medical tourism” industry: The role of transnational migrant patients and health workers’, in F. Thomas (ed.), Handbook of Migration and Health, London: Edward Elgar, pp. 498-514.
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Ormond, M. and Toyota, M. (2016) ‘Confronting economic precariousness through international retirement migration: Japan’s old-age ‘economic refugees’ and Germany’s ‘exported grannies’’, in J.M. Rickley-Boyd, K. Hannam and M. Mostafanezhad (eds), Tourism and Leisure Mobilities: Politics, Work and Play, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 134-146.
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Johnston, R., Crooks, V.A. and Ormond, M. (2015) ‘Policy implications of medical tourism development in destination countries: Revisiting and revising an existing framework by examining the case of Jamaica’, Globalization and Health. http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/11/1/29 [Open access]
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Co-editor of the Social Science and Medicine special issue on international medical travel with David Bell, Ruth Holliday and Tomas Mainil, 2019
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Bell, D., Holliday, R., Ormond, M., and Mainil, T. (2015) ‘Transnational healthcare, cross-border perspectives’, Social Science and Medicine, 124, 284-289. DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.014
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Ormond, M. (2015) 'Solidarity by demand? Exit and voice in international medical travel - The case of Indonesia', Social Science and Medicine, 124, 305-312. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.007
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Ormond, M. (2015) ‘What’s where? Why there? And why care? A geography of responsibility in medical tourism’, in N. Lunt, J. Hanefeld and D. Horsfall (eds), Handbook on Medical Tourism and Patient Mobility, London: Edward Elgar, pp. 123-132.
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Ormond, M. and Mainil, T. (2015) ‘Government and governance strategies in medical tourism’, in N. Lunt, J. Hanefeld and D. Horsfall (eds), Handbook on Medical Tourism and Patient Mobility, London: Edward Elgar, pp. 154-163.
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Ormond, M. (2015; online first in 2013) ‘En route: Transport and embodiment in international medical travel journeys between Indonesia and Malaysia’, Mobilities, 10(2). DOI:10.1080/17450101.2013.857812
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Ormond, M. (2014) ‘Medical tourism’, in C.M. Hall, A. Williams and A. Lew (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Tourism, London: John Wiley & Sons, 425-434.
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Ormond, M., Wong, K.M. and Chan, C.K. (2014) ‘Medical tourism in Malaysia: How can we better identify and manage its advantages and disadvantages?’ Global Health Action, 7(25201). DOI:10.3402/gha.v7.25201
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Ormond, M. (2014) ‘Resorting to Plan J: Popular perceptions of Singaporean retirement migration to Johor, Malaysia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 23(1), 1-26.
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Ormond, M. (2013) Neoliberal Governance and International Medical Travel in Malaysia, Abingdon: Routledge.
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Ormond, M. (2013) ‘Harnessing “diasporic” medical mobilities’, in F. Thomas and J. Gideon (eds), Migration, Health and Inequality, London: Zed Books, pp. 150-162.
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Ormond, M. (2012) ‘Claiming “cultural competence”: The promotion of multi-ethnic Malaysia as a medical tourism destination’, in C.M. Hall (ed.), Medical Tourism: The Ethics, Regulation, and Marketing of Health Mobility, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 187-200.
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Ormond, M. and Sothern, M. (2012) ‘You, too, can be an international medical traveller: Reading medical travel guidebooks’, Health and Place, 18(5), 935-941.
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Ormond, M. (2011) ‘Shifting subjects of healthcare: Placing “medical tourism” in the context of Malaysian domestic healthcare reform’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52(3), 247-259.
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Ormond, M. (2011) ‘Medical tourism, medical exile: Responding to the cross-border pursuit of healthcare in Malaysia’, in C. Minca and T. Oakes (eds), Real Tourism: Practice, Care and Politics in Contemporary Travel, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 143-161.
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Ormond, M. (2008) ‘“First world treatments at third world prices”: The real costs of medical tourism’, in R. Anand and S. Gupta (eds), Medical Tourism – A Growth Industry, Pune, India: Icfai Books, pp. 69-77.