Evaluation of doctors' perspectives on medical tourism: The case of Kuşadası

Objective: With the advancements in science and technology, development in the tourism sector has become inevitable, just like the development in other sectors around the world. For this reason, new studies and research have been conducted in these areas (Akdoğan Kozak and Şahin, 2022). While studies generally focus on medical tourism marketing and medical tourism economy, there are still a limited number of studies related to physicians, who constitute one of the most important elements of the medical tourism. There are important health and tourism elements in the health tourism sector. In the performed research studies, one of the elements that play a major role in medical tourism is patients, while the other important element is physicians. Based on this fact, this thesis aims to determine the opinions on medical tourism by the physicians who provide medical tourism services. By considering demographic characteristics, it was aimed to investigate in detail the differences in communication and managerial problems and perspectives on medical tourism of physicians, who take part in the medical tourism sector. In this study, which was carried out by using a survey method, the aim was to present new ideas to academics and sector individuals by finding out the opinions of physicians on the development of medical tourism. Also, we aim to contribute to the development of medical tourism in Turkey, with the main focus on Kuşadası. The study was conducted in the hospitals located in the Kuşadası town of Aydın, Turkey that had a Health Tourism Authorization Certificate. What sets this study apart from the rest is that there were no previous studies on medical tourism covering Kuşadası, or on the opinions of the physicians that provide medical tourism in the area. In addition, the Aydın Adnan Menderes University IDC Dental Clinic is the first public institution to start health tourism services in Turkey. Material and Method: In the study, literature review was conducted first in order to understand the conceptual framework. In relation, the academic studies regarding health tourism and the physicians were reviewed accordingly. During the data collection phase, the data was collected by surveying the physicians in hospitals with a Health Tourism Authorization Certificate in the Kuşadası area. The participants enrolled in the data collection phase were surveyed face-to-face. Exploratory factor analysis was applied to the survey questions. Frequency distributions of physicians' sociodemographic characteristics were obtained. Cross-tabular analyses were used to analyse the relationships between the sociodemographic characteristics of physicians. In order to test the established hypotheses, parametric or non-parametric statistical analysis tests were used, as depending on whether the assumptions were met or not. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the research on the perspectives of all physicians, who are working in hospitals with health tourism authorization certificate in Kuşadası area. The survey had 27 questions. The survey questions include 9 demographic, 7 communicative problems-based, and 11 managerial problems-based propositions. Quantitative data research method was used in the thesis study. The survey method was used as a data collection tool. During the data collection phase, quantitative research methods were favored because of the difficulty of collecting qualitative data during the COVID-19 pandemic. Quantitative research methods provide data, which is easier to analyze and more objective, when compared to qualitative research methods. Based on the data collected with the survey, frequency distributions, arithmetic mean and standard deviation methods were applied to the analyses. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests were applied. Data analysis was done using the IBM SPSS Statistics 29 application. Summary statistics related to Communicative and Administrative problems and factor total scores based on demographic characteristics were provided accordingly. Additionally, since the proposition question groups targeting communicative and managerial problems provided the assumption of normal distribution, the differences among the groups were determined by "Two independent sample t-test" and "one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)". Also, the groups from which the differences originate were determined by using the "Tukey post-hoc test". Since the total scores of the factors did not meet the assumption of normal distribution, differences between the groups were tested by using "Mann-Whitney U test" and "Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance (K-W ANOVA)" tests. At this point, the determination of the groups causing the differences were found by using the "Dunn Bonferroni" test. Analyzes were performed with a 95% confidence level. Findings: When the demographic data and the hypothesis findings of the physicians working in institutions with health tourism authorization certificate in Kuşadası area were examined, significant differences were found in the variables of "age", "gender", "marital status", "monthly income" and "foreign language knowledge". No statistically significant difference was detected in the variables: "educational background", "professional experience", "receiving training abroad" and "in-institution training". Conclusion: In line with this scope, the role and importance of physicians in medical tourism has emerged. Keywords: Health Tourism Physician, Health Tourism, Medical Tourism.