بررسی موانع ارتباطی توسعه گردشگری درمانی در ایران

Background: Conducting further research on medical tourism as a lucrative business is required. Very little research has been conducted into medical tourism barriers and a large amount of them just note structural barriers. This study is aimed to identify the most important communicational barriers of medical tourism and provide and examine a model of such barriers considering medical tourism`s intercultural nature. Materials & Methods: This study is applied by purpose and survey by method. The three stages in completion of this study are : 1) Identifying the most important communicational barriers of medical tourism in Iran,2) designing a model of identified barriers by using interpretive structural modeling approach 3) examining the designed model in a sample of 300 individuals. Results: Correlation test indicates a positive and significant relationship between variables in less than 0.01 significant level. Regression analysis confirms that all independent variables are significant predictor of the dependent variables .Therefore all hypotheses are confirmed. Conclusion: This survey identified main medical tourism communicational barriers in Iran as: Lack of understanding, Perceived linguistic difference, Lack of trust, Perceived cultural difference, Prejudice, Stereotyping. Overcoming to Lack of understanding as the major obstacle has a dramatic effect on operating medical tourism.