From the Sunday Times:
British people have been infected with the welcome American attitude to competition and customer service. If something isn’t good enough, they complain. In Europe and especially France, people still meekly put up with being sold bad food and bad consumer products and services.
Despite France’s claim to one of the best healthcare services in the world, the only appreciable difference with the NHS appeared to be cleanliness. Instead of the mute mop-draggers, there were armies of cheery diligent cleaners everywhere.
It is not too ridiculous to suggest that while French hospital managers could certainly teach their NHS counterparts about managing a cleaning service, healthcare managers here could teach them a thing or two about concepts of consumer rights. It might help them to treat all their patients with a bit more humanity.
The thurst of the article relates the author’s personal experience of French healthcare. I don’t know how representative it is, but I can imagine the muted and indifferent approach to patient service being true. The author may not have been happy, but what of the French themselves? The system seems to ‘work’ in the sense of delivering good outcomes in aggregate. Do the French focus more on preventative medicine, meaning that less attention is given to the hospital part of the treatment? Do the French take a particularly existential and fatalistic point of view when it comes to health, at the same time reasoning that plush carpets, soft music and an army of nurses wearning synchronised swimmers’ smiles, is unceccessary.
What I do take from this anecdotal story is that you can’t just look at healthcare (at least in the developed world) as a purely economic system that can be exported and bolted on to the infrastructure of another country. Cultural expectations, the prevailing attitude to preventative care, family and other social structures etc. are not independent of the ‘official’ healthcare system in determining outcomes.
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