Wildlife tourism faces a six factor problem in providing medical care for tourists. People traveling on safaris are increasingly older with more medical conditions and are therefore more likely to get sick or hurt. Parks and reserves where safaris take place have no formal medical infrastructure to handle health issues. Camps hosting tourists are small and remote, requiring a decentralized model of care. Getting help or evacuating those who are injured or ill takes a significant amount of time due to the remote locations of parks. These six factors - medical conditions of tourists, lack of infrastructure, small camp size, remote locations, need for decentralized support, and evacuation challenges - create an unsolvable problem for providing consistent medical services to tourists through traditional strategies.

1. Wildlife tourism’s
Six Factor Problem

3. “Sustainable Tourism
is about helping to:
“preserve and enhance the beautiful”
Gail Grimmett, President, Travel Leaders Group’s Elite Travel Division
A group of 7000 travel agencies, the single largest in the USA.

4. Responsible Tourism
‘First do no harm.
Then do some good.’

6. Nathan Layton, 28, stopped breathing within an hour of being bitten at a Wildlife College. He and his girlfriend
came here on an adventure. He died because nobody had a BVM or could manually ventilate. That’s at a
training college. You can teach a lay person how to ventilate a victim, in under five minutes.

7. “this is very very sad. as Zambians we should demand for
answers from the lodge operators. did they give the tourists
instructions on what to do and not to do? where were the
guards? safety issues are not taken seriously in our
country. no wonder people go over to the Zim side. the
elephant should be killed. condolences to the bereaved.”

9. But People get
sick
and they get
hurt
They travel older now.
They have more medical conditions.
Its not unpredictable.
Its just
People.

10. In
Parks
there is
no Medical Infrastructure

11. These factors create an
unsolvable problem for urban
strategies
Safaris involve people and
people will get sick and hurt.
Contractual relationships
create a responsibility to
handle medical.
Parks have no formal
infrastructure therefore no
reliable medical services.
The staff in camps are non-
medical so a system has to be
built on laypeople.
Camps are small and
dispersed requiring a
decentralised, cellular
model.
Parks are remote places so
getting help in or people out
takes a very long time.