Hospitals on Holiday
had a toyur earlier this season which involved a few unscheduled hospital visits. Mrs Latimer broke her arm on the first day when waiting for the coach outside Salisbury cathedral. She was not drunk but a little unsteady on her pins and a pal of mine called my mobile to tell me that she was in a bad way. (Thanks, Paul.)
We ended up finding a hospital in Yeovil, which I had never been to before, where they patched her up her face and put her arm in a cast and a sling. I made the usual jokes about you should see the other bloke and we soldiered on with her having to miss very little of the tour.
I have a hopeless bedside manner at the best of times but I have learned to look concerned enough and to deal with the practicalities of medical care. A trip to the chemist will clear up most minor aches and pains but of course only doctors can prescribe antibiotics and do anything involving broken bones.
Call a doctor out to a hotel and you usually have a bill of £100 or more. Travel insurance will usually cover this but the NHS is still free to anyone, visitor or local, and the A & E departments are often better in an emergency, unless it is Saturday night in Glasgow when the queues are just too long. Hanging around in Yeovil on a Sunday afternoon might not be much fun but it does give people from abroad an education in what our taxes pay for.
Now I am sure Mr and Mrs Latimer, conservative Americans from Alabama, did not vote for President Obama or support his plans for “socialised medicine” as they call it in the US. It would not surprise me if they had accepted the propaganda that it was all a dark plan to introduce socialism to the land of the free and the brave. So they should have been (and, to give them credit, were) pleasantly surprised at the quality of the care they received from the doctors and nurses and the fact that it was all free. They could not have paid for it if they had wanted to.
A similar thing happened some years ago when the doctor actually came to the hotel on the Isle of Skye and gave a sedative shot to a diabetic pasenger whose blood sugar had gone right down at the end of a long day. I will never forget his wife screaming inpanic as he turned grey and then the mad dash to pull suitcases out of the coach to get to his insulin. (Why not in her handbag?) He wokle up the next morning having thought he had dozed off, the docotr accpeted a signature as payment and she could not believe that there was nothing to pay.
Now, I hardly ever get involved in politics when on tour. You need a working knowledge of the way our parliamentary system works, who is in the important offices of state and who is on the way up – and a little political gossip can occasionally for fun. Most people on tours are, frankly, pretty set in their views and past the point when they are open to new ideas. Preaching at them will only hit your tips, so I only offer an opinion if asked for it. Even then I keep my views pretty bland and mainstream (which they usually are anyway).
One of my brothers runs a hospital for he often says that they find it difficult to meet demand in the NHS because of the increasing expectations of patients and medical advances. Put simply, people who died a few decades, even years, ago now expect not to only survive but to send the bill to the taxpayer. The difficult decisions that result gave rise to the myth of the Death Panels of Britain.
Well, Mrs Latimer, you did not have to face a Death Panel and you got pretty good treatment for free. Let us hope you go home and spread the word and help to dispel a few myths now that you are back home.
We ended up finding a hospital in Yeovil, which I had never been to before, where they patched her up her face and put her arm in a cast and a sling. I made the usual jokes about you should see the other bloke and we soldiered on with her having to miss very little of the tour.
I have a hopeless bedside manner at the best of times but I have learned to look concerned enough and to deal with the practicalities of medical care. A trip to the chemist will clear up most minor aches and pains but of course only doctors can prescribe antibiotics and do anything involving broken bones.
Call a doctor out to a hotel and you usually have a bill of £100 or more. Travel insurance will usually cover this but the NHS is still free to anyone, visitor or local, and the A & E departments are often better in an emergency, unless it is Saturday night in Glasgow when the queues are just too long. Hanging around in Yeovil on a Sunday afternoon might not be much fun but it does give people from abroad an education in what our taxes pay for.
Now I am sure Mr and Mrs Latimer, conservative Americans from Alabama, did not vote for President Obama or support his plans for “socialised medicine” as they call it in the US. It would not surprise me if they had accepted the propaganda that it was all a dark plan to introduce socialism to the land of the free and the brave. So they should have been (and, to give them credit, were) pleasantly surprised at the quality of the care they received from the doctors and nurses and the fact that it was all free. They could not have paid for it if they had wanted to.
A similar thing happened some years ago when the doctor actually came to the hotel on the Isle of Skye and gave a sedative shot to a diabetic pasenger whose blood sugar had gone right down at the end of a long day. I will never forget his wife screaming inpanic as he turned grey and then the mad dash to pull suitcases out of the coach to get to his insulin. (Why not in her handbag?) He wokle up the next morning having thought he had dozed off, the docotr accpeted a signature as payment and she could not believe that there was nothing to pay.
Now, I hardly ever get involved in politics when on tour. You need a working knowledge of the way our parliamentary system works, who is in the important offices of state and who is on the way up – and a little political gossip can occasionally for fun. Most people on tours are, frankly, pretty set in their views and past the point when they are open to new ideas. Preaching at them will only hit your tips, so I only offer an opinion if asked for it. Even then I keep my views pretty bland and mainstream (which they usually are anyway).
One of my brothers runs a hospital for he often says that they find it difficult to meet demand in the NHS because of the increasing expectations of patients and medical advances. Put simply, people who died a few decades, even years, ago now expect not to only survive but to send the bill to the taxpayer. The difficult decisions that result gave rise to the myth of the Death Panels of Britain.
Well, Mrs Latimer, you did not have to face a Death Panel and you got pretty good treatment for free. Let us hope you go home and spread the word and help to dispel a few myths now that you are back home.
posted by tourguideddie at 2:48 AM
1 Comments:
Interesting commentary, Eddie! I remember how ably you assisted a rather confused elderly gentleman during my "Best of Britain" tour in the autumn of 1982. Oxford proved just a bit too much for him! As a Canadian who also enjoys socialized health care, I would be interested in hearing if you have had to assist any Canadian tourists in a similar fashion. If so, how have they compared the two systems?
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