One toe in

Over the past couple of days I have been making the acquaintance of Canadian Health Care.
My friend Anne is in hospital recovering from surgery and I have now visited a couple of times and my son Ben has had to see a doctor who sent him for a test.

Canada has a National Health Service but it is structured slightly differently from ours in Britain. As ever, Canadian friends feel free to correct me on details. All Canadians have free cover, but those in employment and whose employer provides a scheme, are able to use a wider range of services. If you do have such a scheme then you are registered through that. I haven't explained this very well, but if I compare this with what sometimes happens in Britain it may become clearer.
In Britain some employers have private health care schemes that they give as a perk to their employees, and I believe it is then taxed as a perk. In Britain, you have a National Health Service number as a matter of course, ie being born or becoming a resident. Your private scheme is quite separate from the NHS. Here, the two schemes seem to overlap and blend together.

In both countries, emergency treatment is through the National Health Service. In Britain there is NHS and there is private and the two don't really overlap, in Canada the private insurance seems to provide a premium service in the way that some of the charter airlines have a premium cabin on their flights and things are a little more polished and less cattle-like.

Thus, although we have had to pay for Ben's medical stuff - I can claim it off his travel insurance - we are using exactly the same facilities as anyone using the Canadian NHS.
Ben alerted us on Sunday night that he needed to see a doctor. On Monday morning we walked into a clinic, there was one other patient waiting to be seen, and he had a consultation, this morning we have been to a radiology clinic and had an ultrasound, even though this was deemed not to be an emergency by the doctor. I can only guess at what the time scale for any of this would be in Britain, but I'm certain that he wouldn't have seen a doctor yet.

The other thing that rather surprised me was the travelling. Ben's appointment was at 8.30 in Vancouver, so driving into the Province's to-all-intents-and-purposes capital city during rush hour, I decided to take a London approach to this. We left here at 7.15, thinking we would be stuck in solid traffic, moving along in first gear, then having to find the clinic, then looking for parking.

Wrong, oh so delightfully wrong. We were parked outside the place by twenty to eight, even after the additional five to ten minutes looking around for the office.
We were too early for most things to even be open, although we discovered a Macdonald's serving brekkie to the type of people who have brekkie at Macdonald's. Oddly, these didn't seem to be the kind of people who eat there on the ads. No business suits, although to be fair, several of the customers were able to walk straight.

Ben it turns out, is fine, although it was never something we could leave until his return to England.

My friend Anne is doing well, and Vancouver General Hospital seems rather fine in comparison to any British hospitals I have visited, and I have visited one or two over the years of my parents' illnesses.

I don't want to pass judgement, I have really only stuck my toe in the water, whereas I have had years of swimming in the British NHS sea and there are certainly things about it that I believe we can be very proud of. Midwifery for one and the computerised system of record-keeping another.

This evening, Kevin and Ben are going to Stanley Park to see the Raconteurs. One of the members of this band was part of the White Stripes and they are getting a lot of press. I have a feeling that Kevin and Ben's journey may not be as easy as ours this morning. Apart from anything else, it is the first night of the Festival of Light - the city's annual firework festival, which is just stunning, but ensures that hundreds of thousands of extra people are going into town.