Dutch retirement migration to Spain and Turkey: Seeking access to healthcare across borders

Abstract

This article focuses on Dutch retirement migrants who move to Spain and Turkey after retirement. Retirement migrants move at a stage in their life cycle which can be associated with health deterioration. The need to seek access to healthcare provisions may therefore be important in the migratory experience of retirement migrants. This article provides an analysis at three different and interrelated levels by drawing on an analytical framework of Faist, Bilecen, Barglowski and Sienkiewicz. The article discusses the interrelationship between: (1) European, national, and private rules and regulations on health care which determine retirement migrants' access to healthcare provisions in the home and host state; (2) retirement migrants' social networks as a space where collective meaning is given to these rules and regulations and where retirement migrants create preferences for healthcare provisions; and (3) retirement migrants' strategies to access their preferred set of healthcare provisions in the home and host state. It will be argued that retirement migrants may navigate their way through the healthcare systems and may change their mobility or residence pattern in order to be seen as a resident in the Netherlands or Spain/Turkey in order to access their preferred set of healthcare provisions.

Este país é para velhos ? Migrações e envelhecimento em Portugal

“…Cada uma destas categorias remete para um pedaço da complexa realidade social produzida pela crescente mobilidade geográfica. Diversas perspetivas foram adotadas para dar conta das várias dimensões dessa complexidade, por exemplo : vulnerabilidade e exclusão social (Ciobanu et al, 2020), acesso a cuidados de saúde (Gehring, 2016), solidariedades familiares (Baldassar, 2007), "lifestyle" (Sampaio & King, 2019), mobilidade transnacional (Bolzman et al, 2017). É um campo que se caracteriza por uma profusão de termos e abordagens.…”

Cross‐border Healthcare in the EU: Welfare Burden or Market Opportunity? Evidence from the Spanish Experience

“…Some scholars have analysed how economic deprivation or physical vulnerability promotes a return to the country of origin (Huete et al ., 2013; Giner‐Monfort et al ., 2016), while a smaller group of researchers have looked at what happens to those who do not return to their country of origin (Ahmed and Hall, 2016; Hall and Hardill, 2016). As a matter of fact, most research to date has rather focused on transnational practices to obtain social protection and flexible forms of individual mobility (Ackers and Dwyer, 2002; Gehring, 2016). However, transnational practices depend on factors such as a favourable institutional setting, the retiree being in good health, and the possibility of fluid mobility.…”

Older migrants and (im)mobilities of Ageing: An introduction

“…Research on older migrants has grown significantly since the turn of the century, much of it at the intersection between migration studies and gerontology. The main research themes have been return migration (Bolzman, Fibbi, & Vial, 2006;Ciobanu & Ramos, 2016;Hunter, 2011), care (Baldassar, Baldock, & Wilding, 2007;Horn, Schweppe, Bender, & Hollstein, 2016;Karl, Ramos, & Kühn, 2017;Torres, Ågård, & Milberg, 2016), international retirement migration (Gehring, 2016;King, Warnes, & Williams, 2000), and increasingly transnationalism (Burholt, Dobbs, & Victor, 2016;Horn & Schweppe, 2016) and the use of ICT (Baldassar, Nedelcu, Merla, & Wilding, 2016;Hunter, 2015). An important contribution was made by Warnes, Friedrich, Kellaher, and Torres (2004) who, without being exhaustive, underline that older migrants constitute a highly heterogeneous population.…”