BACKGROUND The Thailand-Myanmar border separates two very different health systems. The healthcare system in eastern Myanmar remains underdeveloped as a result of decades of instability. Comparatively, Tak province, Thailand has more healthcare resources. In this Thai border province government hospitals and non-governmental organizations provide tuberculosis (TB) treatment to migrants and refu...

Background: The border between Nigeria and Cameroun stretches for hundreds of kilometers. The movement of patients from Maiduguri, NE Nigeria into Cameroun’s border hospitals is becoming very popular. This study investigated the categories of people involved in such movement, their healthcare needs in Cameroun and the motivation behind the movement. Methods: In-depth interviews with fifteen par...

Citizens are increasingly crossing borders within the European Union (EU). Europeans have always been free to travel to receive care abroad, but if they wished to benefit from their statutory social protection scheme, they were subject to their local or national legislation on social protection. This changed in 1991 with the European Court of Justice defining healthcare as a service, starting a...

After a rather long period of preparation, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Directive 2011/24/EU on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare. It entered into force on 24 April 2011, and had to be transposed by the Member States by 25 October 2013. With this Special Issue we aim to give an overview of whether and how the crossborder healthcare directive has b...

The article by Brenna and Spandonaro on interregional mobility for acute hospital care in Italy raises important issues concerning social and territorial equity in a healthcare system. Based on Regions and private providers’ strategic behavior, the hypothesis adopted to explain patient cross-border mobility (CBM), demonstrated by statistical analysis, may be further explored using qualitative m...

In this commentary, we establish a relationship between medical sociology and the study of medical tourism and cross-border healthcare by introducing Ronald Andersen's behavioral model of healthcare use, and linking this model to the recent empirical study of Kovacs et al. on patients travelling to Hungary for orthopedic treatment. Finally, we plead for more measurement in the field of patient ...