Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.
Nobody here seems to be waiting 84 hours in an emergency room, as one NHS patient recently did in Scotland
There wasn’t much they could do about the annoying bone in her foot, that was shown to be broken after a wait-free visit to the on-site radiology suite. But the diagnosis was rapid. The advice on what to do and not to do is proving effective. As encounters with the medical milieu go, I’d give it five stars. It took one hour from arrival to discharge and the co-pay bill (for Ibuprofen and paracetamol) was €2.
In London, going private, this would have cost at least £1,000.
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