If you have followed the JRP for a while, you may remember the GHAP project, a five-year study on patient decision-making when it came to receiving care in another country. This project formed the core of the JRP Internship activities from 2012 until 2015, when the final tasks on the project were completed. For this concluding phase, Junior Researchers plus external academic advisors compiled all evidence from each leg of the entire project, producing a final paper that has just been published by Health Policy, a respected academic journal. The article is entitled An evidence-based policy for improving choice in global health access through medical travel, and it presents a comprehensive, multilevel model of key factors influencing patient choice in a decision-making experiment. This model, along with additional evidence both from GHAP and beyond, are then used to present a nine-point framework recommended to policymakers to consider to encourage informed, safe, and effective decision-making in the context of seeking healthcare abroad.

Special credit to Eduardo García-Garzón, who provided the expertise and leadership to complete the analytical models.

For those interested, the full citation and link to the study is:

Ruggeri, K., Ivanovic, N., Razum, J., Kácha, O., Menezes, I., Zafari, Z., & Garcia-Garzon, E. (2018). An evidence-based policy for improving choice in global health access through medical travel. Health Policy. Link to article