| Verified against primary record | |
| The one official collection located | Latvia publishes medical tourism patients by age group, sex and country of usual residence[1] |
|---|---|
| Its statutory definition | A foreigner receiving elective medical services not covered by State budget resources[2] |
| European hospital data | For non-resident patients, country of residence is reported[3] |
| Records read | A population survey study, two statistical portals, a regulation and three statistical releases, 9 October 2026 |
| Independently reported | |
| Age and sex, one US study | No statistically significant gender or age differences between medical tourists and others[4] |
| What was significant instead | Having no health plan, and cost having prevented a doctor visit[4] |
| Bands apply only to the rows beneath them. No figures are published from the Latvian tables, because the interactive query could not be submitted to retrieve cell values. | |
International patient demographics is the question of who actually travels for treatment. It is almost always answered from provider marketing, because the statistical collections that record age, sex and origin for ordinary travellers do not separate medical travel, and the collections that record medical travel mostly do not record demographics. One national exception was located.
The exception: one country counts properly
Latvia’s Centre for Disease Prevention and Control operates what appears to be a genuine official medical tourism statistics collection, published on the national statistics portal. Its tables cover 2019 to 2025 and carry patients by age group, with categories for under 18, 18 to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55 to 64, and 65 and over; patients and treatment duration by sex; and 246 country values footnoted as country of usual residence, including an unknown category.[1]
What makes it more valuable than the figures themselves is the definition behind it. A medical tourist is defined as a foreigner, a private individual, who travels outside the country of his or her habitual residence, and who receives elective medical services on the administrative territory of Latvia which are not covered by State budget resources, with information compiled from medical treatment institutions and recording the age of a patient at the start of treatment and the country code of the person’s habitual residence.[2]
That is the cleanest statistical definition of a medical tourist located anywhere for this site. Two elements do real work: the care must be elective, which excludes emergencies suffered by ordinary tourists, and it must not be state-funded, which excludes patients arriving under European entitlement arrangements. Both are the distinctions that the aggregate figures discussed in medical travelers and resident foreign patients fail to make.
No figures from those tables are reproduced here. They are served through an interactive query that could not be submitted for this entry, so only the table structure and the definition were read.
What the general collections do and do not carry
European hospital discharge metadata states that for non-resident patients, country of residence is reported, and defines a non-resident as a person who is not a resident of the reporting country. It also records that some countries cannot report country of residence and return those cases as unknown, and that some report the hospital’s location instead of the patient’s residence.[3] So origin is collected, imperfectly. Within the residency split the metadata names in-patients, day cases, bed-days and average length of stay, and not age or sex.
European tourism statistics do carry demographics, and do not carry health travel as a category. The governing regulation lists the profile of the visitor by gender and by age in completed years as separate annual variables, while health treatment appears only as a parenthetical example inside a residual purpose category for personal travel other than leisure or visiting friends and relatives.[5] The demographics and the purpose exist in the same collection and cannot be crossed to produce a medical traveller profile.
The United Kingdom’s passenger survey takes the same shape. Visits for health are reported inside a miscellaneous category together with study, sporting events, shopping, religious and other purposes, and visits for more than one purpose when none predominates.[6] The survey interviewed just under 285,000 passengers in 2022, described as about 0.15 per cent of travellers, with about 90 per cent of passengers entering and leaving having a chance of being sampled, and notes that the number of survey interviews on some routes can be small.[6]
The American air traveller survey publishes purpose of trip as vacation or holiday at 57.1 per cent, visiting friends or relatives at 22.2 per cent and business at 16.4 per cent, with no medical category and no age or sex breakdown on the published results.[7] That is the same survey from which national health-related travel spending is estimated, which is discussed in average expenditure per medical traveler.
The one demographic analysis, and what it found
A study using a United States population health survey for 2016 across eleven states and territories identified 517 medical tourists among 93,492 respondents, a prevalence of 1.32 per cent with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 1.00 to 1.64, which it scaled to approximately 1,130,000 individuals with an interval of 900,000 to 1,410,000. Mexico was the most frequently reported destination with 291 trips at 41 per cent of all trips, followed by Colombia at 45 and Canada at 28, and travellers went to all world regions except Antarctica.[4]
On demographics its finding is a null result: no statistically significant gender or age differences between medical tourists and non-medical tourists. What was significant was access rather than identity, with prevalence ratios of 2.70 for having no current health plan and 2.39 for cost having prevented a doctor visit in the previous twelve months.[4]
Four conditions must travel with these figures. The year is 2016. The coverage is eleven jurisdictions, not a nation. The screening question asked about preplanned medical, dental or surgical procedures, which is broader than medical tourism as the industry uses the term. And the null result on age and sex comes from a 517-person subsample with wide intervals, so it is an underpowered absence of a difference rather than evidence of demographic uniformity.
See also
- Medical tourism surveys, the instruments these figures come from
- Medical travelers and resident foreign patients, the distinction the Latvian definition makes
- Source markets in medical tourism, origin counted from the departure side
- Medical tourism statistics, the overview of what is measured
References
- Centre for Disease Prevention and Control of Latvia. Medical tourism statistics tables, including foreign patients treated under medical tourism by age group and foreign patients and their treatment duration. Official Statistics Portal of Latvia, tables last updated 31 July 2026. Verified against primary record: table structure, dimensions and category lists read; cell values not retrieved. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Centre for Disease Prevention and Control of Latvia. Medical tourism, metadata. Metadata creation date 31 July 2025. Verified against primary record: statistical definition and collection method read in full. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Eurostat. Hospital discharges and length of stay, ESMS metadata, hlth_hosd. Metadata last updated 15 December 2025. Verified against primary record: residency definitions, reporting practice and disseminated variables read. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Stoney RJ, Kozarsky P, Walker AT, Gaines J. Population-based surveillance of medical tourism among U.S. residents from 11 states and territories. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 2022;43(7):870-875; survey reference year 2016. Independently reported: author manuscript read on the agency’s document repository. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- European Parliament and Council. Regulation (EU) No 692/2011 concerning European statistics on tourism, Annexes I and II. Consolidated text as at 31 January 2020. Verified against primary record: variable lists and purpose categories read in the consolidated text. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Office for National Statistics. International Passenger Survey quality and methodology information, last revised 10 May 2023, with Overseas travel and tourism, provisional results, released 19 January 2017. Verified against primary record: sample description and purpose categories read. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- United States National Travel and Tourism Office. 2025 Survey of International Air Travelers results. Undated on the page. Verified against primary record: published results page opened and read. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
Sourcing note: the Latvian tables and metadata, the European hospital metadata, the tourism regulation, the two United Kingdom statistical pages, the American survey results and the population survey study were opened and read on 9 October 2026. No Latvian figures are published, because the portal serves its data through an interactive query that could not be submitted. Latvia is reported as the one official collection of this kind located for this entry, which is a search result and not a finding that no others exist. The United States prevalence figure is reproduced only with its year, its eleven-jurisdiction coverage and the wording of its screening question attached.