New Delhi: India ranks 5th in global research publication output where countries from North America, the European and Pacific dominate both in terms of quantitative and qualitative research, a joint study by Council of Scientific & Industrial Research—National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies (CSIR- NISTADS) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) revealed.

The US emerges as the top most productive country in health tourism research. Countries among the top 10 most productive in 2007-16 were UK (12.59% share), Canada (7.45%), Australia (7.10%), India (3.45%) and Germany (3.38%), Italy, Spain, France and Netherlands (from 2.53% to 2.95%) during 2007-16. The 10 most productive countries in health tourism research accounted for a 68.92% global publication share during 2007-16, which declined from 70.61% to 67.71% from 2007-11 to 2012-16.

With an objective to study the performance of global medical tourism research in last 10 years, researchers retrieved and downloaded 10-year publication data on world output in health tourism from the Scopus database, covering the period 2007-2016. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature—scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.

“The total research output of the world in field of health tourism cumulated to 1,422 publications during 2007-16, with annual output increased from 68 in the year 2007 to 89 publications in the year 2016, registering 7.26% growth per annum," said Dr. B.M. Gupta, from CSIR-NISTADS.

“India ranks second as medical tourism destination in the world after Thailand and India hosts about 150,000 medical tourists annually, and this number is expected to grow 15% every year. For enabling counties like India to perform better in qualitative terms in future, it is desirable that the stakeholders in India should strive to give high priority to research in this area and also promote international collaborative research," he said.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex Indian research body in 2016 admitted that biomedical research projects being conducted in all the 32 scientific organisations of the ICMR spread across the country had been affected owing to the resource crunch. Because the body received 50% of the sought funds, the research has been stalled in the country.

Categories of different treatments and their availability also represent an important factor in decision to engage in medical tourism, the study pointed out. The most common types of procedures that patients pursue during medical tourism trips are elective cosmetic surgery, dentistry, organ transplantation, cardiac surgery and orthopaedic surgery.

However, a wide variety of services can be obtained through medical tourism, ranging from various essential treatments to different kinds of traditional and alternative treatments. Reproductive tourism and reproductive outsourcing are growing in popularity, which is the practice of travelling to India to engage in surrogate pregnancy, in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology methods.

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