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Medical schools aspire to graduate doctors who are competent in interpreting, conducting and publishing scientific research. Hence, the purpose of the paper is explore the impact of a structured compulsory community-oriented, project-based research program in the undergraduate medical curriculum on medical graduates’ future careers, publications and motivation for scientific research.

An online questionnaire was sent through the Alumni Association of the Arabian Gulf University (AGU) to medical graduates who have valid email addresses, seeking information on their scientific productivity along with demographic and current employment data. Responses were collated and analyzed using a standard statistical software package. The chi-square test and p-value were calculated. P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Completed forms were received from 91 medical graduates. In this sample, almost a quarter of the respondents have published a research paper out of their undergraduate research project, and about 50% have published at least one paper (as main or co-author) after graduation. Both demographic and medical specialty was not related to the doctor's perception of the benefits they have attained from the compulsory undergraduate research program. However, medical graduates who are at senior levels in their medical careers and those who are employed in secondary healthcare are significantly more likely to publish research papers.

The compulsory community-oriented, project-based research program in AGU has positively contributed to the research productivity of graduates, and it would be worthwhile to include such programs as an integral part of the undergraduate medical curriculum.

This article aims to know the direction of current research based on the previous research in the last ten years (2012–2021).

Text mining was integrated with a network and content analysis as part of the mix methodological approach. The scientific articles, on the other hand, were assembled on Litmaps through web scraping. This process selected 86 articles about medical tourism published between 2012 and 2021. This study employed AntConc, RStudio and Gephi tools for data analysis and visualization.

A total of 138 articles were identified through Litmaps using web scraping and 86 studies met the criteria. The trend of medical tourism research is a positive sign for tourism and health industries; this is the beginning to recognize the importance of elaborating on these two topics. Several researchers have frequently studied issues of destination, hospital, development, quality, stakeholders, surgery, service, economics and policy. Policymakers must establish a medical tourism ecosystem to accommodate all stakeholders in this industry. This study also recommends focusing on supply and institution for medical tourism future research.

This literature review presents research trends on medical tourism in 2012–2021 based solely on articles available on the Litmaps search engine. If the time span is extended and the sources of articles are expanded there will be more literature available for analysis. The articles obtained are also only articles published in English due to the language limitations of the author.

Policymakers must establish a medical tourism ecosystem to accommodate all stakeholders in this industry. Stakeholders must work together to provide medical tourism package therefore people can get their health services while visiting available tourist areas.

The literary study of medical tourism over 10 years is considered the most recent systematic literature review.

The purpose of this research is to examine, from the self-efficacy standpoint, the factors that influence medical tourists' use of social media for travel planning. To that end, this study presents a conceptual framework for evaluating medical tourists' online behaviour and empirically tests the model's validity by examining various dimensions of self-efficacy.

A sample of 224 people who searched for medical tourism information online was used in this study. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the proposed model with data from an online questionnaire survey.

The findings suggest that sources of self-efficacy reinforce one's belief in the ability to use social media for medical travel planning purposes. According to the structural model analysis results, with the exception of social persuasion (SP), all of the proposed factors were significant sources of self-efficacy.

The findings can assist medical tourism providers in optimising online searches for medical travel information, as well as medical tourism destination marketers in directing the tourism providers' marketing efforts towards the use of social media to target potential medical tourists more efficiently and on a larger scale.

This study is being conducted in response to a significant knowledge gap in identifying the factors that influence medical tourists' online behaviour. This information can help medical tourism destination marketers gain a competitive advantage by using social media to target potential medical tourists more effectively and on a larger scale.

Is humanity heading to immortal living? If so, what areas of society are playing an active role in achieving this? In order to understand this, the study explores the relationship between immortality and the wellness and medical tourism industry to seek potential relationships between them and ultimately, asks difficult questions about the growth of these tourism sectors and the potential need for greater regulation of them.

Taking a pragmatic philosophical approach and through the examination of refined information from secondary sources and published material and reports, the study presents original theoretical knowledge and a model exploring tourism and human immortality.

This paper argues that continued growth in the wellness and medical markets today could lead to a world where transhumanists and cyborgs are present in our world, even taking over from Homo sapiens. The study presents a model highlighting the potential role of wellness and medical tourism markets, illustrating the potential for future consumer services that could further fuel the search for immortality. Thus, how such markets and consumer desires are (in)directly supporting humanities desire for (non-human) immortal existence.

Today, individuals are driven by wellness practices and medical and cosmetic desires and are willing to travel the globe in search of companies who are either capable of carrying out the desired procedures or seeking prices more affordable to them. This research offers novel insights into these complex relationships and maps the affiliation between wellness and medical practices and the concept of immortality.

This paper aims to introduce an under-researched concept, travel medicine, to the hospitality field and proposes future research directions. This paper also highlights the need to acknowledge the missing link between hospitality and medical science and encourages research on the health of hotel guests, especially those with mental disorders.

By synthesizing relevant literature, this study proposes a conceptual framework focused on identifying and filling knowledge gaps between hospitality and medical science. Pathways for empirical research on hotel guests’ travel health are suggested accordingly.

This paper reveals that the topic of travel medicine has been neglected in hospitality, especially in relation to vulnerable hotel guests. Additionally, this study suggests that researchers should move beyond the confines of social science and conduct interdisciplinary hospitality studies. In-depth analyses of hotel guests’ health and safety are also recommended.

This conceptual piece serves as a “provocation” that is exploratory, thus laying a foundation for future interdisciplinary studies bridging hospitality and medical science. This paper offers practical significance for hospitality stakeholders (i.e. academics, practitioners, hotel guests and society) and also provides guidelines on how to create vulnerability-friendly hospitality environments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study takes an important step toward interdisciplinary research between hospitality and medical science through the lens of travel medicine. This paper offers insight to bridge these disciplines and extend hospitality research into medical science. This paper further identifies an under-investigated topic and feasible research avenues that can offer timely solutions for hospitality academics and practitioners.

This paper aims to examine the marketing strategies designed by three innovative early 1900s food companies. It traces the coordination of these businesses’ research funding, advertising, direct mail and promotional tactics to show how they intersected and impacted consumers and health professionals in the period when scientists were first able to quantify the relationship between good health and food. The paper analyzes internal company documents, advertisements and marketing materials from Knox Gelatine, Borden and Sunkist.

Research for this paper benefited from the author’s unlimited access to the private documents of the Knox Gelatine Company and its executives. These documents were analyzed chronologically and thematically. They chronicled the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and the ways it cultivated home economists. The paper also used publicly available digitized documents from Sunkist and Borden. The paper would benefit from further detailed analysis of these documents to parse Knox’s targeting by race and ethnicity.

In the 1920s, Knox, Borden and Sunkist developed a marketing strategy which leveraged a new class of experts – the hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, home economists, teachers and government agents who advised American women. By distributing specific laboratory research on the nutritional benefits of their products to this emerging class of health professionals and the consumers who trusted them, these companies developed relationships with opinion leaders designed specifically to influence product sales.

This research benefited from access to the private documents of Knox Gelatine Company which divulge the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and cultivate home economists. The paper would benefit from further analysis of these documents to parse the company’s targeting by race and ethnicity as well as a deeper comparison to companies that tried to work with health professionals unsuccessfully and companies that adopted this tactic in the household products or tobacco area. Opportunities also exist to do a fuller analysis of variations in food marketing by rural versus urban as well as race.

By reconstructing the sequencing and content of these three companies’ 1920s marketing strategies, this research uncovers a form of early 20th century food marketing directed at health and science professionals which has been neglected in advertising histories.

The study aims to facilitate the medical tourists visiting emerging countries for various kinds of ailments by ranking the possible destinations to avail medical treatments.

A Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process (FAHP) with a mixed-method approach is applied to analyze data collected from patients and substantiate it with medical tour operators in India to gain managerial insights on the choice-making patterns of the patients.

India is a preferred emerging market location due to the low cost and high medical staff quality. India offers value for money, whereas Singapore and Thailand are preferred destinations for quality and technology.

The study will facilitate the emerging markets' governments, hospitals and medical tourists to understand the importance of various determinants responsible for availing medical treatment outside their country.

The study recommends that cost and quality care are the patients' prime focus; government policies must provide clear guidelines on what the hospitals and country environment can offer and accordingly align the marketing strategies.

This study is the first attempt to rank various factors affecting medical tourism using the FAHP approach.

Ineffective management inventory of medical products such as blood and vaccines can create severe repercussions for hospitals, clinics or medical enterprises, such as surgery delays and postponements. Inventory sharing is a form of horizontal collaboration that can provide solutions to key actors of the healthcare supply chain (HSC), yet no prior study reviewed this topic.

This study conducts a systematic literature review of thirty-nine inventory-sharing studies in the context of HSCs published from 2012 until early 2022. The descriptive and thematic analyses include chronological distribution, geographical location, comparison between developed/developing regions, stakeholder and incident analysis.

Thematic analysis classified inventory sharing among five product supply chains (blood, medical supplies, medicines, vaccines and generic medical products). Benefits include shortage reduction, cost minimisation, and wastage mitigation. Barriers include (1) IT infrastructure, (2) social systems, (3) cost and (4) supply chain operations. Perishable inventory policies include Fresher-First (FF), Last-Expire-First-Out (LEFO), First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and First-Expire-First-Out (FEFO). The analysis also showed differences between developed and developing countries. The study identifies several future research opportunities that include (1) product utilisation rate, (2) cost reductions, (3) shortage mitigation and (4) waste reduction.

No prior study has systematically reviewed inventory sharing in HSCs to reveal benefits, barriers, patterns and gaps in the current literature. It makes five propositions and develops a research model to guide future research. The study concludes with theoretical and managerial implications.

This paper aims to examine whether medical tourism can be a frontrunner in terms of post-pandemic recovery for the industry

A mixed-method analysis of 17 interviews and 210 questionnaires involving medical tourists to Iran was applied.

Medical tourists perceived the risks posed by COVID-19 as a temporal one, and attitudes toward post pandemic visitation intentions remained strong. In addition, these tourists can mostly be classified into responsive individuals, who demonstrate not only high risk but also high efficacy levels to negotiate the threats posed by the pandemic. No gender differences were located between male and female medical tourists in terms of post-COVID-19 travel intentions to Iran.

This research extends the application of the risk perception attitude framework to a medical tourism context. Furthermore, medical tourists are uncovered as another segment of crisis-resistant tourists.

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore how medical secretaries experience digital transformation in a Swedish healthcare organisation, with a focus on workplace climate and health.

Data were collected using a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design based on grounded theory, with qualitative data collection (a Quality Café and individual interviews) followed by quantitative data collection (a questionnaire).

Four categories with seven underlying factors were identified, emphasising the crucial need for effective organisation of digital transformation. This is vital due to the increased knowledge and skills in utilising technology. The evolving roles and responsibilities of medical secretaries in dynamic healthcare settings should be clearly defined and acknowledged, highlighting the importance of professionality. Ensuring proper training for medical secretaries and other occupations in emerging techniques is crucial, emphasising equal value and knowledge across each role. Associations were found between some factors and the health of medical secretaries.

This study adds to the knowledge on digital transformation in healthcare by examining an important occupation. Most data were collected online, which may be a limitation of this study.

Several aspects of the medical secretaries’ experiences were identified. Knowledge of these is valuable for healthcare managers to make digital transformation more effective while avoiding excessive strain on medical secretaries.

Medical secretaries are expected to contribute to the digitalisation of healthcare. However, minimal research has been conducted on the role of medical secretaries in workplace digitalisation, focusing on workplace roles and its dynamics.