‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, looking my Slovakian friend in the eye. ‘You are going to go back to your own country because the healthcare here is no good?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is no good. Is terrible. I leave job and go home and sign on. I get treatment in Slovakia.’ I shook my head like a wet dog as if this might rouse me from a rum sort of surrealist nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was true. My Slovakian friend, who seems sane enough, has decided to leave Britain in search of a better life in Bratislava.
I don’t know her that well, it is true. She’s a friend’s lodger. We have become acquainted over the months she has been living in his house in Surrey and she seems nice enough.
She came to this country some years ago in search of employment — although I’m not sure why because her country is now one of the fastest growing economies in the EU.
But whatever her reasons, she came here, found a job and has been working at a car dealership. Then she became ill with a stomach complaint. She claims, and I can find no obvious reason to doubt her, that she has not received what she would regard as adequate attention from our National Health Service.
Well, look, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? If she says she’s unhappy, who am I to argue with her? If she says the NHS is offering her a worse service than the one she’s used to in a central European emerging economy, she must know what she’s talking about. I cannot argue with the fact that she is packing her bags to go back and use Slovak healthcare instead of the NHS, can I? Because she’s doing it.
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