MEDICAL TOURISM IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Nowadays, medical tourism industry has made great contributes to economic development and has become a hot topic of public concerned. The term ‘medical tourism' generally refers to the behavior of patients traveling abroad to obtain medical services outside the established cross-border medical arrangement. Obviously, medical tourism is the combination of the medical industry and tourism industry. Although numerous researchers have made great contributions to this topic, the research on the relationship between medical resources and consumer decision-making through quantity and empirical analysis is limited. To fill this gap and explore the medical resources how to influence tourists’ decision-making in Malaysia, this research adopts the method of quantitative research by distributing questionnaires to collect data in three locations' hospital in Malaysia, Kuala Lumper(central), Penang(north) and Malacca (south), and construct the conceptual framework based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The research results show that high-quality medical resource and service quality significantly affect the consumer-patients’ decision-making, especially, the service of private hospital give consumer impressive images. However, perceptive price reasonableness has the less affluence, the researcher propose that nationality constrain of consumer is more likely its reasons in this study, therefore, suggests taking account of the nationality and other individual features in the further study of consumer intentions.

In addition, this research expects to help scholars, marketers, and practitioners understand how medical tourists shape their decision to tourism treatment. Especially for Malaysia, one of main international destinations of international medical tourism, this is conducive to the expansion of the medical tourism market.