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Introducing “The Travel Doctor-TMVC Welcome
Home Survey”

What is it?

At the Travel Doctor-TMVC we trust that all travellers have a great travel experience, be it for holiday or work, & we are constantly striving to provide our clients with the best, most useful advice, preventions & treatments.

For more than 20 years we have been refining our information & services to ensure the health of travellers. One vital way we can improve is by asking our travellers about their travel, their health issues, & how they solved those problems. By sharing your experience & knowledge, we can improve the management of all international travellers.

So we would like to know about your experience as it assists us to gain a better understanding of the travel health issues that affect you as a traveller. We do this via our “Welcome Home Survey”, a confidential on-line survey through which we ask all our travellers a series of questions about their trip after they return home. The information we gain from our travellers improves our services & advice for the future.

What kind of questions does it ask?

This Travel Doctor-TMVC Welcome Home Survey looks at a range of issues. Broadly, these include:

• Some basic questions about you & your trip, such as your itinerary, including destination/s, length of stay, accommodation & so on. This information helps us to understand specific risk factors that may have influenced your trip;
• Information about whether you got sick, while away, if so how you dealt with it, & if the advice & services you received in our clinics assisted you in staying healthy or managing your illness. This assists us in keeping up to date with the prevalence of travel health issues in various places, as well as providing some very direct feedback about the quality of our services;
• Questions about your behaviour & activities while travelling such as drinking tap water or eating from street vendors. Understanding what our travellers do while away, helps us to identify areas that our professional staff should focus on when seeing patients so as to provide more effective advisory services & consultations; and
• Some questions about your perceptions of risk, which also assists us in identifying area & topics that our Doctors & Nurses should get a better understanding of so that they can tailor their advice appropriately.

 

How do I complete the Welcome Home Survey?

At some stage during your interactions with our clinics, either when you have made an appointment, or when you’re attending for your appointment one of our administrative personnel will have asked you for your email address. This is usually used for advising you of the need for follow up vaccinations & boosters if you are having a course of vaccines.

When you return home we’ll then invite you to complete the online survey by sending you a URL to the site where the Welcome Home Survey is hosted.

It should only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Each month we’ll also randomly select a completed survey for to receive a free Travellers Medical Kit upon their next visit to a Travel Doctor-TMVC clinic for a consultation.

What kind of information comes out of Welcome Home Survey?

It’s been several years since we last did a Welcome Home Survey, but it provided some very interesting results. Some of these are summarised below.

Days lost due to illness or accidents
Did you know around 18% of travellers lose at least 1 day of their trip to illness, with almost 4% losing 4 more days of their trip?

This is a very clear indication that some of our travellers will get some kind of illness while they are travelling. This information alone is a strong reminder that greater efforts are required to reduce the incidence of illness in travellers, & our Doctors & Nurses need to continue to focus attention on the latest travel health issues.

Our last Welcome Home Survey also provided us with some very specific information about what kinds of travel health issues affected peoples’ trips. Some of these are highlighted below:

Travellers reporting illness or injury at various destinations

 

USA/Japan/Europe

Africa

Asia

South America

Africa + Asia

Total

Diarrhoea

31%

43%

37%

40%

58%

39%

Respiratory tract

42%

34%

25%

20%

32%

28%

Accident/injury

5%

6%

4%

5%

11%

6%

Other illness (eg rash, fever)

14%

11%

21%

9%

5%

11%


Source: Travel Doctor Welcome Home Survey

While most of us think that travel health issues such as traveller’s diarrhoea is only a problem in developing countries, our last Welcome Home Survey told us that these things are also of concern in developed countries such as the USA, Japan & Europe.

This kind of information assists us to provide more accurate, more targeted advice, & offer services better aimed at keeping you well.

Thanks for participating, we need your help to keep us informed of what issues are important you, or that impact upon your travel. We would be very appreciative of you spending a few moments to complete the “Travel Doctor-TMVC Welcome Home Survey” when invited.