What can healthcare tell us about a country鈥檚 culture? According to , the founder of travel company , quite a lot. He has been leading groups of healthcare professionals around the world for around 20 years, providing insights into the way other cultures view their profession. Among many offerings are tours specifically designed for palliative care workers. Through guided trips to destinations in India, China, South Africa, Nepal, and Vietnam, among others, Jon and his team have helped countless practitioners explore the world of palliative care beyond their own cultural contexts.
Lexa Frail (LF): Tell me about your company and the palliative care tours.
Jon Baines (JB): My company, Jon Baines Tours, ran our first tour in September 2007. The majority of the tours that we organize are study tours for healthcare professionals, allowing them to look at their profession in a different destination and a different culture. And I think the latter part is very important.
Before I started my company, I worked for a healthcare publisher that published a palliative care journal. On the back of that, we were asked to organize a couple of tours. Those first tours went to China, where palliative care was in its infancy. After founding my company, the first trips I organized were to southern India. They were led by a nurse called Gilly Burn, who helped establish hospices and change legislation to make pain relief more available to healthcare professionals. We ran a number of tours with her and went from there. Since then, we鈥檝e run tours all over the world.
LF: What inspired you to start these tours?
JB: I've always loved travel and when I travel, I鈥檓 a bit of a geek in that I like to have a focus. I'm also very interested in other cultures and I think by having that professional focus, you get a lot more insight into a particular culture than on a standard tour. Then, when you meet other members of your profession, it reinforces those impressions. You're talking about the same issues that you'll be dealing with in Canada or the UK or Australia, but in India. Therefore, you're not just looking at differences in terms of disposable income, but in terms of the means that they have, the difference of cultures, and that's fascinating.
Culture influences everything and culture really makes a difference in terms of healthcare and healthcare delivery, particularly in an area like palliative care. It involves many different aspects of life鈥攑articularly spiritual and societal鈥攊n ways that you wouldn't normally think about. By going on a study tour like this, meeting your opposite numbers and looking at how they view life and death, how they look at end of life care, you get a real insight into that culture. Our recurring palliative care tour in India, for example, talks about dying in the Hindu culture and the belief system around it. That's particularly useful if you're then going back to your culture and treating members of that country鈥檚 diaspora. All of a sudden, you've got an understanding of where your patients and their families are coming from. I find that by taking a deep dive into cultures and understanding them, you can gain a lot of perspective.
LF: What have your participants found most impactful about these trips?
JB: Two very different things, actually. After one tour, a hospice nurse wrote, 鈥淚've never had so much fun鈥� and I thought that was unusual. But then she said, 鈥測ou鈥檝e got to understand. All these people work in this pressurized environment. Suddenly, you're with a group of your peers from around the world, exploring the culture of another place. You can let go.鈥�
The people we take are part of the palliative care community. It's a safe space so they can relax, and that's where the enjoyment side comes from. I suppose the other impactful part is spending time in the NGO's鈥攏ot the big hospitals, not the private hospitals, but the non-governmental charities, where people are doing amazing work on limited resources. In the West, we're always talking about how we haven't got the support we need, but in countries predominantly from developing worlds鈥擲outh Africa, Nepal, India, Vietnam鈥攖hey don't have great resources. Where you have a good, positive, ambitious charity sector that鈥檚 successful, that's where it makes the biggest impact. Outside Calcutta, there鈥檚 an outstanding place called the Saroj Gupta Cancer Centre and Research Institute that does amazing work without a huge budget. When people go there, they come back inspired, and that is very impactful in a way that makes a real difference in people鈥檚 lives.
We also meet some pioneers of palliative care on our tours. Two people who spring to mind: Dr. Rajagopal, the father of palliative care in India, and Suresh Kumar, who has a community-based model up in northern Kerala. They're both wonderful people and have done an awful lot to make a positive difference to people's lives. So, I think the NGO sector, the fact that you're with like-minded colleagues, and some of the outstanding individuals you meet, are the most impactful aspects of these tours.
LF: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
JB: Going back to the cultural thing, it's interesting how some places have really developed palliative care in terms of a community-based model, the holistic, and the psychosocial, which I think is positive and needed. I found that most beneficial in my experience with friends and family at the end of their life. Other countries haven鈥檛 followed this same model, and it's not always 鈥渙h, the most developed have gone for one and the least developed for another.鈥� It doesn't really work like that, which is quite interesting. Some modern countries have great medicine, but in terms of their end-of-life model, I think it's fair to say there's more work they need to do. It's not what you'd expect. So, that's what makes this job interesting.
I'm looking at new countries now. We're considering a tour in Sri Lanka and one to Hungary and Romania, for different reasons. In Sri Lanka, they're coming up with ideas based on those in India and trying to implement them. With Hungary and Romania, there's lots of different faiths in this relatively small area. So, I'm curious to see how that makes a difference in terms of the delivery of palliative care. It never stops being fascinating.
To book with Jon Baines Tours, you can visit their for more information. Their next upcoming tour, , will be led by , from February 22 to March 8, 2026.