19th February 2017

As I and the NHS approach our 70th birthday, we both need a full body scan! No more standing on the scales myopically ignoring the obvious. The problem is nostalgia. No-one likes change, even when it's so obvious. Using the French health system shows up strikingly all that is wrong with the UK and the US systems. Here's a plan: 1. UK: raise your annual GDP from the current 9.1% to at least the French 11.5%. 2. US: introduce a national, fair system based on the French model. 3. Each government to pay 70% of all health costs; individuals 30% - the latter paid for via Government-approved, cheap health insurance. 4. Built-in safeguards for free access to the low-paid and the terminally ill. 5. Introduce French-style carte vitales, with built-in health history microchips to use at all pharmacies/hospitals/surgeries for instant, free access to care.  Why? UK: this will cut at a stroke the excessive queues for urgent care, no longer 'not enough beds', whilst providing free taxis from home to hospital for those with long-duration conditions. No need for so many highly-paid administrators as the system won't need them. US: no longer can you say you can't afford to go to the doctor.  Nostalgia? Forget it. It's a thing of the past.

16 November 2014

In a few weeks Him indoors will start a daily course of treatment for 7 weeks at the Claude-Bernard Clinic in Albi. In the wake of the latest NHS scandal at Colchester Hospital, where patients were found strapped to beds and given sedatives without permission, it'll give us chance, once again, to compare the French health system with the English.  And it is only the system. In my experience doctors in both countries are equally as good, but the English ones are hampered by an NHS system that has broken down due to sheer weight of numbers.  A recent survey showed that French patients are seen in A & E within 2 hours, half the 'target time' of the NHS.  Most are seen in less than one hour, those with traumatic conditions like poisoning being seen immediately. Yes, in France the patient is king: everything is patient-orientated. At a Limoges Hospital, staff listened and introduced different colour coding for staff uniforms. And what does Him indoors think? He says he'd better not swallow a 5-euro note at the clinic because then they'd have to keep him in for observation to see if there was any change...

21st April 2013

If you feel reasonably well, is it better to have regular health check-ups or (as my family used to say) keep away from doctors and hospitals? American doctors want their patients to live (so that they can keep taking their money) whereas English hospitals want you actually to die to free up the beds!

Here in France, people complain that doctors often don't even look at their patients, preferring to stare at their computer screens. To make matters worse, the tests patients are being sent for are extremely costly to France's health service.  In French daily Le Parisien I read that blood and urine tests cost a staggering €2.5 billion in 2011, MRIs cost €917 million and screening for colon cancer cost €97 million in France. Dr. Jean Dubousset, a Paris-based surgeon, even advocates that there's too much screening going on which 'can lead to unnecessary anxiety among patients'. 'Fitting a pacemaker for someone suffering from Alzheimer's disease is both a moral and financial aberration,' said another.  Why?  Even if the patient isn't aware of it, he still needs it!

Him indoors says, wherever you live, it's all about cost, not the patient.  When the doctor says 'this is going to  hurt', it's not the needle it's his invoice!

4th April 2010

Everywhere I look these days, health issues are in the news. The current French system is that the government pays 70% of a patient's costs, the remaining 30% paid by the individual. French working people contribute via their pay towards this 30%, but some hardy, optimistic expats hope they'll never get ill. The remaining worriers (like me) take up top-up insurance. There are a few problems with this. Some new early-retiree expats with a residual medical history are discovering that private insurance companies are refusing them cover to bridge the gap until they reach full retirement age.
But I've now discovered that we British expats shouldn't be paying this 30% at all (however it's funded)! I think there's a big con going on. It seems that the UK pays France c.100% for each of its pensioners who've paid N.I. contributions all their lives, but then individuals pay the French government this 30% anyway. So France wins hands-down!!
As it's a large part of our monthly outgoings here, I've written to my British MP, Lynne Jones - who may listen in this run-up to the election. In any case, let's hope that, if the Conservatives get in as predicted, the only big con in the future is David Cameron. And Him indoors? He says all parties are short-sighted anyway, like him. Yesterday he said, you'll never guess who I bumped into? Everyone.

7th March 2010

Lots of UK election sound-bites afoot about much-needed changes, particularly in education and health. Good! Generations of UK schoolchildren have been short-changed. The brain must be trained to think independently before introducing PCs, calculators and more advanced education. Bevan's original postwar NHS ideal has collapsed due to too-many people chasing ever-increasing health treatments and cost-driven drugs. Result: blow-out.
French schoolchildren have always followed a traditional regime, primary children attending 6h p.d., 4 days p.w.
French healthcare is rightly lauded as the best health system in the world, but I doubt if the UK would ever accept the switch from free care to one based on regulated payments and refunds. Besides, illegal immigrants wouldn't like the automatic id checks via the health cards! A new French innovation is a website like http://www.icalin.sante.gouv.fr/ where results on 5 key indicators, superbugs, illness prevention, post-operative infections, antibiotic use, post-operative deaths, can be checked hospital by hospital.
And my experience? In our French village I see that even primary children greet me politely in English in the street, and that hospital patients return home praising their treatment. Enough said. And Him indoors: he tells the doctor he has a low pain threshhold, so the doctor says the next procedure will hurt a bit....here's the bill!

2nd December 2008

Good health is vital to us all - indeed, it was the primary reason for our moving to a country where the health care is one of the best in the world. But, there is one affliction that looms larger than all others, and about which we all seem to fear more than anything else. Yes, it's that dreaded word: cancer. Every so often, hope is stimulated when reading about the latest advances in curing the disease, only to fall again when nothing obvious is happening. However, I was particularly interested to hear that the French PM, Francois Fillon, has just unveiled the world's most powerful cancer weapon: the Arronax cyclotron (named after the Jules Verne professor in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea). How the machine differs from smaller machines already in existence is that it can make much larger quantities of injectable substances which target cancerous areas directly, rather than the alternative chemotherapy, which is not targeted and doctors just proscribe and hope it works. In the past, typically a doctor would remove the tumour, if at all possible, and hope that the person gets better, but often the cancer would persist in the body, ready to fire up again. This new radioactive medicine would kill for ever those micro-tumours lurking in the body.
Having lost a brother earlier this year, plus a mother, grandmother, aunt and grandfather decades ago - all through cancer - I fervently hope that this new machine can do what all other measures have so far failed to do: stop the big C time-bomb. Of course, what I really hope and wish for is for someone to discover the fuse that lights the bomb in the first place. Now, if Jean-Francois Chatal, the professor of nuclear medicine who developed the Arronax, and the rest of the Nantes research team could only come up with that.....