Conflicts between prioritizing medical care and profit-making for a Thai hospital: A critical discourse analysis research

Private hospitals are caught between two conflicting purposes: providing medical care and profit-making. In this paper, Bumrungrad International Hospital (BIH) and its wellness center subsidiary, Vitallife is investigated from a critical perspective on how it prioritizes these two purposes through examining the homepages and overview pages from its websites using iterative thematic analysis and lexical analyses (keyword analysis, metaphor analysis, and lexical presuppositions). The iterative thematic analysis categorized website information into three key categories: medical issues, non-traditional health issues, and issues associated with profit making, with frequency of items in the categories taken as measures of emphasis. The keyword analysis involved identifying relatively frequent and salient lexical items as keywords with relative frequency measured through log-likelihood against benchmark corpus. The metaphor analysis identified key recurring metaphorical uses of lexis, which are taken as indicative of the conceptual systems of the hospital. The main presuppositions identified were existential presuppositions which assume the existence of the mentioned items. The results highlight how the hospital WebPages prioritize profit-making issues over medical issues to attract customers, while the Vitallife WebPages aim to expand the market of potential customers by redefining healthcare. These findings are considered in relation to the hospital’s stated goals, social expectations and Thai government policies.