In Praise of the Mauritian Universal Free Health Care System
18.06.2026
There was an honest interview written by top journalist Jean Claude Antoine of a man called Yves Giraud that recently went viral. It was published in Week-End on 17 May. It even prompted the Minister of Financial Services Jyoti Jeetun to threaten insurance companies and clinics to get their act together or else.
Mr. Giraud outlined, with carefully gathered evidence and soberly argued logic, the kind of problems – they are inherent problems – in private health care provided by clinics. A cacophony of complaints against clinics ensued.
It is time for us all to stop and think.
So, as a rejoinder, I would like to recount my positive experience, by contrast, with the hospital services.
Though I would prefer not to, I am prepared to put my private health issues out in public because it is in the public interest that we all stand up to protect the free, universal health care, and call for its improvement. In particular, it is important to give support to the staff at all levels. Otherwise we will all fall prey to the shortcomings inherent in private clinics. It is important at this moment because the hospital system is under irrational attack, chronically, and recently with the mindless anti-hospital outbursts of Labour M.P. Annabelle Savabaddy. The private radio program she was making a scene on, as if to expose the nation-wide assault on the system, ironically included a paid advertisement for private health care. This juxtaposition also makes us stop and think. What is going on?
Here is my testimony.
I was feeling so sick in February this year that I went to Jeetoo Hospital, and not just to the Bambous Area Health Centre I usually go to. At Casualty, I took out a card as everyone does, and had a very short wait in a queue. Perhaps 30 minutes, during which time my blood pressure was taken, a pin-prick test was done for diabetes, and so on, like everybody else’s. The doctor who consulted me was absolutely perfect. I explained that I felt so sick and had so much pain across my whole torso, and that I was almost sure it was just from the mourning of losing my husband recently. I said I had come to the hospital just in case it was something physical. He said my blood pressure was very high, and I assured him that I do not have high blood pressure, on the contrary I live happily on a low pressure. He asked questions and took notes conscientiously. He consulted my tummy and found a sore spot. He sent me for an X-ray and a cardiogram test, both on the spot, each with a short queue. When I returned with both, he had asked me to have my blood pressure checked a second time to see if it was still so high. It was. My X-ray was clear as was my cardiogram test. My blood pressure was still very high, so he asked me to monitor it every morning and keep a diary. He then said he agreed with me it looked like it was probably an acute psychosomatic illness. But, he would, bearing in mind I have gluten intolerance as well, he said, book me for a dual investigation, a colonoscopy and, because of the tenderness he found in one spot in my tummy, a gastroscopy, for two or three months’ later, but with strict instructions to just turn up at the Hospital if I was in distress again before that date. He informed me he would give me no medication. This is, to me, the ultimate test of an excellent medical practitioner: his first decision after consultation and initial investigations was whether to do anything at all or do nothing, in terms of treatment.
So I give five stars to the Jeetoo Hospital Casualty that day. Every other patient was receiving the same care as I was. Staff and other patients all help each other to make the system, understaffed as it is, work. There is nothing nicer than us all being treated with equal respect.
So, the next step was a preliminary rendezvous at the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Unit, to confirm and set a date for the dual investigations, to look down into the top end of my gut, the oesophagus, stomach and small intestine, and at the same time, look up from the bottom end at my colon and bowels.
I duly went to the Unit on the day of my appointment to follow up. I was second in the queue that day, and was out again before my 9:00 am rendezvous. I had instructions to come back again a few days before the investigations for details about prepping myself, along with the other 35-odd patients that would go through either one or both procedures on the day fixed. We all, at home, would all purge ourselves from midday the previous day, so that there would be nothing in our alimentary system the next day so the doctors could clearly see what they needed to. And we would turn up, accompanied by someone, be dressed in loose clothing and bearing a hand towel.
I arrived on the appointed day, accompanied by a friend, at about 8:00 am to avoid traffic. I was 10th in line. We were all nervous. Everyone was put at ease by the staff. Explanations were constantly being given. An old lady who had brought neither her appointment card nor her ID card, was asked gently to remember to bring them in future, and they just made very sure she was the person on their list! I helped a very anxious man next to me to relax. Anyway, just before 9:00 we were, three by three, moved on to trolleys in an adjoining room, then mildly sedated, then trolleyed one by one into the “theatre”.
The atmosphere throughout was light and yet formal. The efficiency was total. When the doctor took my blood pressure on the spot, I assured him that it was low, and warned him that it seems my blood pressure goes up at the sight of a hospital! There was repartee.
Afterwards, when I re-organized my clothes, and it was my turn to stand up in the waiting room and listen at the counter, a doctor with my report in her hand gave me a full account of what they had seen. The colonoscopy was clear, and the gastroscopy showed the beginnings of what could be an ulcer, and a test showed the presence of higher quantities than there should be of a particular bacteria. So, I was given a prescription for a longish course of two anti-biotics, as well as pills that decrease the production of acid.
I was given a rendezvous for July. When I go they will check that the bacteria are indeed eliminated. At the Pharmacy in the Hospital we, and everyone in the queue in front of us, got the medicines prescribed. The lady just in front of us had come with four or five little bags, to pick up medicines for different patients, and had each one fully dispensed, and fully explained.
The whole dual investigation was over, a new appointment fixed, and prescription dispensed by about 11:00 am.
The Gastroenterology and Hepatology Unit gets not just five stars, which is maximum, but five stars PLUS.
The Gift Relationship
Universal free medicine is based on “the gift relationship”. The staff are giving us their services. By contributing VAT taxes, we ensure the staff are paid, have good working conditions. We also ensure through our taxes that we all together provide the buildings, the infra-structure, the advanced technology and the medicines that all of us need, when we need them. When we give blood as donors, this symbolizes “the gift relationship”. That is the true basis of all civilization. Neighbours and friends already share it. And we all basically depend upon the kindness of strangers every day and sometimes all day. That is our shared humanity.
Buying and selling for profit
Clinics are something quite different. They are buying and selling, most of them interested in profits, and putting pressure on their doctors and other staff to maximize these profits. This was poignantly expressed by Mr. Yves Giraud and Mr. Jean Claude Antoine in their masterpiece. It went viral, not like most viral content that is hysterical, indignant, outraged or sadistic or all of the above, but simply because it exposed before our eyes the true nature of the commercialization of health care as if it were a commodity.
My previous experience
I would like to end by saying the following. I have worked in Hospitals – as Nurses’ Aid in the Johannesburg General in South Africa and in two different capacities in the London-based National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, as a touch typist for the top surgeons after brain operations, and in the Social Workers’ Department. I lived with for over 50 years with Ram Seegobin, a brilliant medical practitioner, who was a Registrar on the Medical Side at Kings College Hospital in Dulwich, London and later a general practitioner first in London, and then for 25 years in the Bambous Health Project, where we had decided we would both go on all emergency home visits.
I have myself used the hospital services in South Africa, the UK, and also here for over 50 years used the Mauritius universal free health care hospital system. I have used the services of the Dispensary, later called “Area Health Centre”, in Bambous where I live for the past 25 years. (Before that I was in the Bambous Health Project, the neighbourhood autogestionary primary health care co-operative which, incidentally, I give five stars PLUS PLUS, the second PLUS for its democratic component.)
All this to say, I am judging this recent positive experience I had at Jeetoo Hospital in the context of someone with experience – both elsewhere and on other occasions at Jeetoo. There has been a massive improvement, in my measured view, in the process of diagnosis, which has made the system become first class. This, again in my view, began when the hospitals became training hospitals for young medical practitioners. The consultants and senior doctors are, by definition, now always in the process of explaining to their trainee doctors what the provisional diagnosis is, and how they intend to narrow this down. This process makes the experienced staff really top professionals. Hats off!
So, what is missing in the hospital system? I would say, not much. “Mank pa 5-su, me selman enn kas, pu fer Rupi la ron.”
Enn su dan sa enn kas ki manke la: mank staf. There is a marked shortage of nursing and nurses’ aid level staff. There is a marked shortage of records clerks. Recruit more staff. Minister Baichoo has announced the recruitment of more nursing staff. Bravo! Make sure all young people know how to apply for this training, and what a fine profession it is, and so on!
Lot enn su dan sa enn kas ki manke la: sertin staf ena latitid birokratik. Some staff members in one or two dysfunctional units act like bureaucrats, it is true. Most times my experience has been that the staff take on the “lost dossier” or the “but you have not done this test yet, therefore you cannot get discharged”, and go look for the dossier, find it, or get the test done pronto with the help of the Laboratory Unit. But I have seen a few act as if it is not their fault that the dossier is lost or a test is missing, “therefore” the problem cannot be solved. But in the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Unit, whoever is in charge has inspired every single staff member I came across, and I must have seen at least 15 or so in my three visits there, to act in a democratic, not bureaucratic, spirit in relation to all patients all the time.
So, let us all defend this system of universal free health care based on the gift relationship. Three-quarters of us in the country use it. Let us help make it work. This way we can one day have all the investment, which is socially produced by past labour after all, into a single, genuinely universal, free health care system – and all the clinics can be absorbed into a democratized system for all. We are all just human beings. And we are all special. No-one is more than human, or more special. We all need good health care.
Lindsey Collen
