Valorie Crooks

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Simon Fraser University

While significant research has been produced in the field of disability studies, little attention has been paid to experiences of chronic illness. Working Bodies emphasizes the workplace as an important site for understanding such experiences, as employment status has an enormous impact on social and economic standing in Canadian society. The essay...

Recent trends document growth in medical tourism, the private pursuit of medical interventions abroad. Medical tourism introduces challenges to decision-making that impact and are impacted by the physician-patient trust relationship—a relationship on which the foundation of beneficent health care lies. The objective of the study is to examine the v...

Medical tourism involves patients' intentional travel to privately obtain medical care in another country. Empirical evidence regarding health and safety risks facing medical tourists is limited. Consideration of this issue is dominated by speculation and lacks meaningful input from people with specific expertise in patient health and safety. We co...

Palliative care is delivered by a number of professional groups and informal providers across a range of settings. This arrangement works well in that it maximizes avenues for providing care, but may also bring about complicated ‘politics’ due to struggles over control and decision-making power. Thirty-one interviews conducted with formal and infor...

Crowdfunding campaigners can struggle with protecting their personal information while providing a compelling case for why their campaign is worthy of support. Little research has examined donation‐based crowdfunding campaigners' experience of protecting their sensitive health‐related information while trying to meet their fundraising goals. Our re...

Background Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term care (LTC) homes in British Columbia, Canada, restricted visitation to ensure the safety of their residents against transmission of the novel coronavirus. As such, these LTC homes had to quickly implement a rapid rollout of telehealth services to maintain physician care for residents while avoidi...

Background International retirement migration, which is the seasonal or permanent relocation of older people to another country, has grown in popularity in recent years. These retirees are motivated by the promise of warmer winter climates that are conducive to participating in health-promoting recreational and social activities. Ease of cross-bord...

Objectives The goals of this rapid realist review were to ask: (a) what are the key mechanisms that drive successful interventions for long COVID in long-term care (LTC) and (b) what are the critical contexts that determine whether the mechanisms produce the intended outcomes? Design Rapid realist review. Data sources Medline, CINAHL, Embase, Psy...

Medical crowdfunding is growing in popularity in a number of countries, including Canada. In the crowdfunding context people write and share their own stories. This activity also intersects with conventional news media practices when journalists prepare stories about these campaigns. This intersection raises the question of what are print journalis...

While donation‐based crowdfunding for health‐related purposes raises hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, most campaigns fail to meet their fundraising goals. Crowdfunding campaigners are advised to seek traditional news media coverage of their campaigns to increase donor interest and fundraising success. In this study, we seek to better underst...

When patients travel abroad for medical care that is privately paid for and arranged, they are participating in medical tourism. The procedures sought by medical tourists are varied and can include dental and cosmetic procedures along with major surgeries. An ever‐increasing number of countries are looking to enter the medical tourism market or enh...

Social media spreads information about vaccines and can be used to better understand public attitudes about them. Using American crowdfunding campaigns that mentioned COVID-19 vaccines from January 2020 to March 2021, this paper investigates public attitudes towards vaccines, specifically the perceived role vaccines could (or couldn’t) play in endi...

Every year tens of thousands of older Canadians travel to the southern United States (US) to live there seasonally during the winter months to enjoy a warmer climate—a practice known as international retirement migration. Several factors facilitate participation in this transnational mobility, including having the financial resources needed to live...

Background Online crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe fundraise millions of dollars annually for campaigners. Medical crowdfunding is a very popular campaign type, with campaigners often requesting funds to cover basic health and medical care needs. Here we explore the ways that health needs intersect with housing needs in Canadian crowdfunding...

With billions of active users, social media platforms now generate spatial data on a massive scale, which presents researchers with opportunities to use this data in new and innovative ways. There is a body of literature within which location-based social media data have been used as a means to spatially analyze certain phenomenon. Due to the low c...

International retirement migration involves the seasonal relocation of older adults to destinations abroad. For Canadians, this is typically done to escape winter at home in favour of warmer weather elsewhere. In this paper, we explore how Canadian newspapers chronicled the changes associated with managing the COVID‐19 pandemic in Canada, including...

Background Increasing men’s involvement in their pregnant partners’ wellness has been reported as one of the ways to improve access to and utilization of maternal health services, including birth preparedness and complication readiness. Men can play meaningful roles in the support systems that pregnant women need to achieve better maternal health o...

Background Cannabidiol (CBD) is commonly used to manage symptoms in conditions and diseases for which there is limited clinical research for its application. How consumers arrive and decide to use CBD for medical treatment, despite lacking clinical evidence, is largely unknown. In this paper, we seek to identify the informational pathways through w...

Online charitable crowdfunding has become an increasingly prevalent way for Canadians to deal with costs that they would otherwise not be able to shoulder on their own. With the onset of COVID-19 and related lockdown measures, there is evidence of a surge in crowdfunding use relating to the pandemic. This study gathered, classified, and analysed Ca...

Background In Canada, the legalization of cannabis has enabled cannabidiol (CBD) to become a popular commercial product, increasingly used for medical or therapeutic purposes. There are currently over one thousand CBD products available globally, ranging from oil extracts to CBD-infused beverages. Despite increased usage and availability, the evide...

Access to a regular primary care provider is essential to quality care. In Canada, where 15% of patients are unattached (i.e., without a regular provider), centralized waiting lists (CWLs) help attach patients to a primary care provider (family physician or nurse practitioner). Previous studies reveal mechanisms needed for CWLs to work, but focus m...

Background Every year, tens of thousands of older Canadians travel abroad during the winter months to enjoy warmer destinations that offer social and recreational opportunities. How do these Canadians prepare to manage their health while abroad? In this analysis we explore this question by developing a typology of preparatory strategies. Methods S...

This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection p...

When people use online platforms to solicit funds from others for health-related needs, they are engaging in medical crowdfunding. This form of crowdfunding is growing in popularity, and its visibility is increasing as campaigns are commonly shared via social networking. A number of ethical issues have been raised about medical crowdfunding, one of...

This study explores the informal care roles involved in the delivery of maternal health services by Rwanda’s elected maternal community health workers. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 such workers in five Rwandan districts to explore their understandings of why they were elected for this voluntary position; what motivates them to fu...

Background: Increasing numbers of older individuals opt to spend extended time abroad each year for lifestyle, health, and financial reasons. This practice is known as international retirement migration, and it is particularly popular among retirees in Global North countries such as Canada. Despite the popularity of international retirement migrat...

Context Many health systems have centralized waiting lists (CWLs), but there is limited evidence on CWL effectiveness and how to design and implement them. Aim To understand how CWLs’ design and implementation influence their use and effect on access to healthcare. Methods We conducted a realist review (n = 21 articles), extracting context-interv...

Lyme disease remains a contested illness in Canada, thereby making the diagnostic and treatment journeys difficult for some people. One outcome of this is that increasing numbers of people are turning to medical crowdfunding to support access to alternative therapies, non-local health care providers and assist with managing the costs of everyday li...

Background: In Canada, access to palliative care is a growing concern, particularly in rural communities. These communities have constrained health care services and accessing local palliative care can be challenging. The Site Suitability Model (SSM) was developed to identify rural "candidate" communities with need for palliative care services and...

The first Science Meets Parliament event in Canada was held in November 2018 in Ottawa, where twenty-eight Tier II Canada Research Chairs (a specific class of Canadian university professor acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field) from diverse disciplines met with forty-three Members of Canadian Parliament and Sena...

The first Science Meets Parliament event in Canada was held in November 2018 in Ottawa, where twenty-eight Tier II Canada Research Chairs (a specific class of Canadian university professor acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field) from diverse disciplines met with forty-three Members of Canadian Parliament and Sena...

Background: In Rwanda, community health workers (CHWs) are an integral part of the health system. For maternal health, CHWs are involved in linking members of the communities in which they live to the formal health care system to address preventative, routine, and acute maternal care needs. Drawing on the findings from in-depth interviews with mat...

BACKGROUND There are a range of perceived gaps and shortcomings in the publicly funded Canadian health system. These include wait times for care, lack of public insurance coverage for dental care and pharmaceuticals, and difficulties accessing specialist care. Medical crowdfunding is a response to these gaps where individuals raise funding from the...

Background: There are a range of perceived gaps and shortcomings in the publicly funded Canadian health system. These include wait times for care, lack of public insurance coverage for dental care and pharmaceuticals, and difficulties accessing specialist care. Medical crowdfunding is a response to these gaps where individuals raise funds from the...

It is known that older persons from many countries often enjoy living abroad for weeks or months of the year, often to avoid periods of harsh weather at home. However, there has been little attempt to synthesize existing knowledge of this practice, often called retirement migration. Scoping reviews are a widely accepted form of research synthesis....

When Canadian medical tourists go abroad, they are often accompanied by friends and family, referred to as caregiver-companions, who provide informal care. These individuals play a role in patient decision-making and are stakeholders in medical tourism, yet little is known about their participation in this consumer health practice. To examine the r...

This article explores how existing health inequities in the Guatemalan health system facilitate the emergence of its medical tourism industry. We report on our thematic analysis of 50 key informant interviews conducted with 4 groups of stakeholders in the local medical tourism sector. Participants frequently discussed the interplay between the coun...

Background: Medical tourism, which involves cross-border travel to access private, non-emergency medical interventions, is growing in many Latin American Caribbean countries. The commodification and export of private health services is often promoted due to perceived economic benefits. Research indicates growing concern for health inequities cause...

This is an encyclopedia entry providing short overview of retirement migration.

Objectives Medical crowdfunding is a rapidly growing practice where individuals leverage social networks to raise money for health-related needs. This practice has allowed many to access healthcare and avoid medical debt but has also raised a number of ethical concerns. A dominant criticism of this practice is that it is likely to increase inequiti...

Objectives: In Canada, the rural elderly population is increasing in size, as is their need for palliative care services in these settings. This analysis aims to identify awareness-associated barriers to delivering rural palliative care services, along with suggestions for improving service delivery from the perspective of local health care provid...

Canada has the lowest rate of attachment to primary care providers among OECD countries, which makes access and continuity of care problematic. To address this important issue, seven Canadian provinces have implemented centralized waiting lists (CWLs) for unattached patients in primary care. Introduced at different times, no two provinces' CWLs are...

Purpose: This article explores first-hand accounts of Canadian bariatric patients’ experiences of seeking and obtaining weight loss surgery abroad through the practice of medical tourism. While researchers have identified many of the challenges and associated health and safety risks imposed on patients by engaging in medical tourism generally, litt...

Background Regulation of the medical tourism and public health sectors overlap in many instances, raising questions of how patient safety, economic growth, and health equity can be protected. The case of Guatemala is used to explore how the regulatory challenges posed by medical tourism should be dealt with in countries seeking to grow this sector....

Background: Caribbean offshore medical schools are for-profit, private institutions that provide undergraduate medical education to primarily international students, including from the United States or Canada. Despite the growing role that offshore medical schools play in training Canadian physicians, little is known about how these institutions a...

Background: Medical tourism is a practice where patients travel internationally to purchase medical services. Medical tourists travel abroad for reasons including costly care, long wait times for care, and limited availability of desired procedures stemming from legal and/or regulatory restrictions. This paper examines bariatric (weight loss) surg...

Background: Medical tourism is a term used to describe the phenomenon of individuals intentionally traveling across national borders to privately purchase medical care. The medical tourism industry has been portrayed in the media as an "escape valve" providing alternative care options as a result of vast economic asymmetries between the global nor...

Introduction Centralized waiting lists (CWLs) are one solution to reduce the problematic number of patients without a regular primary care provider. This article describes different models of CWLs for unattached patients implemented in seven Canadian provinces and identifies common issues in the implementation of these CWLs. Methods Logic models o...

Purpose: Despite established knowledge that tourists often fall ill or are injured abroad, little is known about their treatment. The intent of this study was to explore health care professionals’ treatment provision experiences on Cozumel Island, Mexico. Methods: 13 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with professionals across a number of h...

Because insurers typically will not pay for unproven stem cell interventions, patients seeking these services must purchase them out-of-pocket or use alternative funding mechanisms such as crowdfunding (ie, using online social networks to solicit donations).¹ Crowdfunding for stem cell interventions raises questions concerning how their benefits an...

Introduction: Centralized waiting lists (CWLs) are one solution to reduce the problematic number of patients without a regular primary care provider. This article describes different models of CWLs for unattached patients implemented in seven Canadian provinces and identifies common issues in the implementation of these CWLs. Methods: Logic models...

Background: Health service administrators make decisions regarding how to best use limited resources to have the most significant impact. Service siting models are tools that can help in this capacity. Here we build on our own mixed-method service siting model focused on identifying rural Canadian communities most in need of and ready for palliati...

Medical tourism is the intentional movement of patients from one country to another in order to seek medical care privately. Medical tourism is a global industry involving hospitals in destination countries that range in development level and health indicators, and the procedures offered to international patients are highly varied. It is thought th...

Background Although the global growth of privatized health care services in the form of medical tourism appears to generate economic benefits, there is debate about medical tourism’s impacts on health equity in countries that receive medical tourists. Studies of the processes of economic globalization in relation to social determinants of health su...

We developed an index to measure potential need for palliative care services (PCIX). This is an instrument that enables spatial identification of potential population-level need for palliative care services and can be developed using census data. Four indicators of potential need for palliative care services -age, sex, living arrangement, socio-eco...

Background Canadian international medical graduates are Canadian-citizens who have graduated from a medical school outside of Canada or the United States. A growing number of Canadians enroll in medical school abroad, including at Caribbean offshore medical schools. Often, Canadians studying medicine abroad attempt to return to Canada for postgradu...

We examine the perspectives of 14 key informants with extensive knowledge of dental care provision in Canada regarding systemic factors that could push Canadians to participate in dental tourism. Drawing on interview discussions about Canadians' access to dental care and their participation in dental tourism, we identify systemic factors related to...

International lifestyle and retirement migration is a growing phenomenon, yet little is known about migrants' experiences of health care in destination countries. This includes use of and access to pharmaceutical selling establishments. This article explores international lifestyle and retirement migrants' experiences and perceptions of the local p...

Background Medical tourism, the practice of persons intentionally travelling across international boundaries to access medical care, has drawn increasing attention from researchers, particularly in relation to potential ethical concerns of this practice. Researchers have expressed concern for potential negative impacts to individual safety, public...

Los Algodones, Mexico is characteristic of other medical border towns whose proximity to the Mexico-United States border enables American and Canadian patients to take advantage of economic asymmetries on either side of the border to access desired health care. Los Algodones is unique, however, in its focus on the provision of dental care and claim...

In October 2016, the Global Healthcare Policy and Management Forum was held at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. The goal of the forum was to discuss the role of the state in regulating and supporting the development of medical tourism. Forum attendees came from 10 countries. In this short report article, we identify key lessons from the forum...

Background Offshore medical schools are for-profit, private enterprises located in the Caribbean that provide undergraduate medical education to students who must leave the region for postgraduate training and also typically to practice. This growing industry attracts many medical students from the US and Canada who wish to return home to practice...

Medical tourism is the practice of traveling across international borders with the intention of accessing medical care, paid for out-of-pocket. This practice has implications for preferential access to medical care for Canadians both through inbound and outbound medical tourism. In this paper, we identify four patterns of medical tourism with impli...

Background When seeking care at international hospitals and clinics, medical tourists are often accompanied by family members, friends, or other caregivers. Such caregiver-companions assume a variety of roles and responsibilities and typically offer physical assistance, provide emotional support, and aid in decision-making and record keeping as med...

Medical tourism is the intentional movement of patients from one country to another in order to privately seek medical care. Medical tourism is a global industry involving hospitals in destination countries that range in development and health indicators, and the procedures offered to international patients are highly varied. It is thought that som...

Medical crowdfunding is growing in terms of the number of active campaigns, amount of funding raised and public visibility. Little is known about how campaigners appeal to potential donors outside of anecdotal evidence collected in news reports on specific medical crowdfunding campaigns. This paper offers a first step towards addressing this knowle...

Background Having a regular primary care provider (i.e., family physician or nurse practitioner) is widely considered to be a prerequisite for obtaining healthcare that is timely, accessible, continuous, comprehensive, and well-coordinated with other parts of the healthcare system. Yet, 4.6 million Canadians, approximately 15% of Canada’s populatio...

The dental tourism industry situated along the northern Mexican border provides care primarily to American and Canadian tourists crossing the border to access dental treatments that cost less than domestically provided. This movement of patients across the Mexico–United States (US) border supports the practices of numerous dental clinics in norther...

Canadians are motivated to travel abroad for bariatric surgery owing to wait times for care and restrictions on access at home for various reasons. While such surgery abroad is typically paid for privately, if "bariatric tourists" experience complications or have other essential medical needs upon their return to Canada, these costs are borne by th...

Background: Many governments and health care providers worldwide are enthusiastic to develop medical tourism as a service export. Despite the popularity of this policy uptake, there is relatively little known about the specific local factors prospectively motivating and informing development of this sector. Objective: To identify common social,...

Background Medical tourism has attracted considerable interest within the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. Governments in the region tout the economic potential of treating foreign patients while several new private hospitals primarily target international patients. This analysis explores the perspectives of a range of medical tourism sec...

Crowdfunding involves raising money from large groups of individuals, often through the use of websites dedicated to this purpose. Crowdfunding campaigns aimed at raising money to pay for expenses related to receiving medical treatment are receiving increased media attention and there is evidence that medical crowdfunding websites are heavily used....

In 2010, Castleden and colleagues published a paper in this journal using the concept of 'place' as an analytic tool to understand the nature of palliative care provision in a rural region in British Columbia, Canada. This publication was based upon pilot data collected for a larger research project that has since been completed. With the addition...

The international migration of health workers, including long-term care workers (LCWs) for aging populations, contributes to a shortage of these workers in many parts of the world. In the Anglophone Caribbean, LCW shortages and the migration of nurses to take on LCW positions abroad threaten the health of local populations and widen global inequiti...

We draw lines to divide our world into specific places, territories, and categories. Although borders and boundaries are dynamic and socially constructed, their existence creates many broad impacts on our lives by geographically distinguishing between groups (e.g., us/them; here/there; inside/outside) at various scales from the national down to the...

Enabled by globalizing processes such as trade liberalization, medical tourism is a practice that involves patients' intentional travel to privately obtain medical care in another country. Empirical legal research on this issue is limited and seldom based on the perspectives of destination countries receiving medical tourists. We consulted with div...

Canadians travelling abroad for privately arranged surgeries paid for out-of-pocket are engaging in what has come to be known as medical tourism. They are often accompanied by friends or family members, who we call caregiver-companions. Caregiver-companions provide care in and across a variety of formal and informal settings, such as in hotels, air...

Medical tourism is a practice where individuals cross international borders with the intention of privately purchasing healthcare. Caribbean countries are increasingly entering into the medical tourism market, which presents both opportunities and dangers. Our previous fieldwork shows that medical tourism requires host countries to balance the inte...

This study examines the experiences of informal caregivers in medical tourism through an ethics of care lens. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 Canadians who had accompanied their friends or family members abroad for surgery, asking questions that dealt with their experiences prior to, during and after travel. Thematic analysis reveal...

Background Access to health services such as palliative care is determined not only by health policy but a number of legacies linked to geography and settlement patterns. We use GIS to calculate potential spatio-temporal access to palliative care services. In addition, we combine qualitative data with spatial analysis to develop a unique mixed-meth...

Background: Medical tourism is now targeted by many hospitals and governments worldwide for further growth and investment. Southeast Asia provides what is perhaps the best documented example of medical tourism development and promotion on a regional scale, but interest in the practice is growing in locations where it is not yet established. Numerou...