A genre-based investigation of the “About Us” section of private hospitals’ websites

Medical tourism industry is currently viewed as one of the lucrative sources of income for some countries and in essence, owes much of its reputation and success to private hospitals and the Internet (Connell, 2006). However, how these private hospitals discursively present themselves to prospective health tourists in order to entice them to use their medical services rather than their rivals’ still remains under-researched. Following the ESP genre school, this study seeks to explore the “About Us” sections of private hospitals’ websites and aims to see how such sections are rhetorically designed and constructed. Using Bhatia’s (1993, 2004) move structures for promotional texts, this study examines the rhetorical structure of the constituent webpages of the “About Us” sections of forty-one Malaysian private hospitals’ websites. Our study demonstrates how Malaysian private hospitals utilize a number of cognitive structures to present and promote themselves in their “About Us” sections. Our findings are, in general, beneficial for the private hospitals in Malaysia or elsewhere in the world, and in particular, are helpful for novice medical website designers.