La Maladie du NHS

13 January 2018, 20:54 | Updated: 13 January 2018, 21:01

The NHS is in such a state that the best hospital in Britain is in France.

The entirely unexpected onset of winter has plunged the health service into its yearly crisis. Someone should buy the authorities a calendar, with the cold months highlighted in blue, so they can plan for their arrival.

There is a government target of seeing people in A&E within four hours, a time period known as: not nearly quickly enough.

If you have your head lodged in a saucepan, or a garden implement sticking out of your torso, it would be quite nice to be attended to faster than it takes to watch the extended version of The Lord of the Rings.

Sadly, this is not possible due to entirely predictable unforeseen circumstances.

The Shadow Health Secretary, Labour's Jonathan Ashworth said that the Prime Minister had lost control of the NHS.

This is a statement from the opposition to the Prime Minister of the day that comes along as regularly as Christmas.

To help ameliorate the calamitous state of the NHS, patients in Kent that are still mobile are being advised to hop on a ferry and hot-foot it to Calais, where they will seen tout de suite.

The French hospital is being run in conjunction with the British health service and the treatment you will receive is practically alike, with a few small changes.

In France, for instance, you will not be kept in an ambulance in the car park while a bed is found for you to die on and hospital corridors will not be full of people on trolleys waiting for a ward, like a scene in M*A*S*H.

Furthermore, in the French hospital, every doctor and nurse is fluent in our mother tongue. That is how you will be able to tell where you are when you wake up from your operation – in France, everyone speaks perfect English.

And instead of trailing across the ward to the one toilet by the door, and sharing a bathroom with twenty other people, you will be stationed in your own room, with an en-suite, which in French is called an “en-suite”.

The Calais hospital is described as a modern facility, with 500 beds and it serves French food.

It seems a shame that you have to be ill to go there.

Relatives and friends can book rooms for themselves in the hospital while they are visiting their loved ones. They cost just £35 a night and meals are £7.10.

The best bit is the wait time for treatment. Compared to Britain, there isn't any. Four weeks for your surgical procedure that has just been cancelled in Kent.

Oddly, this excellent offer is not being taken up. The Kent authorities are having to re-advertise the service because so few have availed themselves of the opportunity.

Maybe the people of Kent would rather die a slow death in the south of England than recover speedily in the north of France.

It could be that they don't like the idea of waking up to a continental breakfast.

They insist on the full English or nothing, which might be why many of them are needing hospital treatment in the first place.

It seems odd that it has come to this, especially after Theresa May declared that the NHS would be better prepared for winter than ever before.

It is difficult to know what she meant by that. Perhaps she has become confused. Maybe she needs a check-up.

If she gets on the Eurostar, I know a place that could fit her in straight away.