When we moved to the UAE, I realised our days of sitting in NHS doctor’s surgeries reading tatty magazines and looking at the pot plant on the windowsill were over (and believe me, I have mixed feelings about this).
Here’s one of the places we go to for healthcare. The 60,000-square-foot state-of-the-art centre is located in a shopping mall. You go to Fashion Parking and can valet park if you like. This is the airport terminal-style waiting room where you can people watch on stylish seating, before being led off to one of the 50 consultation suites. In all honesty, a fan of the NHS, I still haven’t got used to seeing the doctor at the mall (and having a laparoscopy or MRI while you could be shopping for shoes, I’m just not sure!)
Not a sponsored post, but more info at Mediclinic Dubai Mall.
That looks incredible. How does the healthcare work – is it all insurance based?
Yes, healthcare for expats is private (it’s free for Emiratis). Our insurance is provided by the airline and is really good – in fact, I swear hospitals get excited when they see us coming! I’ve been meaning to do a blog on this for ages as it’s such an interesting subject. You can basically phone up specialists all over Dubai and make your own appointment. So it’s quite American-style – lots of expensive tests are carried out, I’m sure far more than you’d get in the NHS. The doctors come from all over the world and a lot of the nurses are Filipino. There are some cultural differences, and communication sometimes has me frustrated, but I guess that can happen anywhere. Something odd I realised the other day was that you can buy antibiotics over the counter here without a prescription, and yet when we tried to get antibiotics for the hamster, we were told the vet had to see her!
Wow. I thought the Samsung Medical Center was swank (and it is, compared to most places,) but this….just, wow.
We also go to the Emirates medical clinic, which has airplanes on the walls!
Dubai Mall Medical Centre was my first employer when I moved there. Emaar had not opened it yet, it was still a construction site so I and a number of other western nurses wrote policies and orientation programmes for the newer nurses. We all moved into it and spent a number of weeks stepping over stuff while they finished it off. The quality was only ever quite superficial unfortunately, and one by one the western nurses left. Eventually it was taken over by Mediclinic and has improved vastly.
How very interesting! Thanks for commenting…I can imagine that stepping over construction work while writing policies must have felt quite pioneering and stressful all at the same time! Mediclinic now certainly seems to be running a big business there – I had an MRI there and they threw in a free ultrasound!