"Healthcare" Top 5 Page for this destination Marrakesh Favorite Tip by toonsarah

Favorite thing: It’s a shame perhaps that VT doesn’t have a category for “Least Favourite Memory”. I really didn’t want to be able to write this tip but since I unfortunately acquired a fair bit of experience of Moroccan healthcare it seems worth sharing for the benefit of others – though I hope you won’t need it!

When we first began to suspect that my foot was broken, Katy (the owner of our riad) offered to call a doctor to examine me. He came and was very professional and courteous. He explained that he worked for several of the major hotels and specialised in treating foreign tourists. He gave me a referral to a clinic and said he would meet us there. So a taxi was called and off we went, though the riad’s location at the end of a dead-end lane was a challenge – four blocks to walk before I could get into any sort of vehicle!

At the clinic, which was in the modern part of the city (Gueliz) I was met by a porter with a wheelchair, and it was wonderful not to have to walk any further on my painful foot. We found out afterwards that this was a private clinic, and while some of the facilities were not as good as at home, there was nothing to concern me especially. The staff were very nice, and I was seen for my x-ray immediately, which is not usually the case here in England. I did have to wait for the verdict though as “my” doctor was seeing another patient in the same clinic. And once the foot was pronounced broken, I had to wait some more while a specialist was sent for from another clinic (I think) to come and put it into plaster and give me advice. He also gave me a prescription, although we didn’t realise this until after he had left and we came to pay the bill. I was prescribed painkillers and also a daily injection to prevent thrombosis, which I was told I would have to have for a month. However on my return to England I was told that it was not really necessary unless I was bed-bound, though the Moroccan doctor may well have been taking precautions as he knew I was due to fly home.

This injection became a bit of a nuisance for the rest of the week, as each morning before we could embark on our (limited) sightseeing I had to go to a pharmacy to buy the syringe and then to a nurse who would inject it. Luckily our regular taxi driver Mokhtar was very helpful and each day either he (if we were going on an outing) or one of his colleagues would take me where I needed to go. On one occasion the pharmacy where we bought the syringe had a nurse who could do the injection but on the other days it meant two stops. A couple of these nurses were perhaps not as careful as they should have been and I ended up with some spectacular bruises from the needles, but after a couple of days we settled on a regular visit to the same guy who was very nice. It cost just 20 dirhams for this service – less than £2.

Overall I would say that my experience of the healthcare here was pretty positive, so although as I say I hope you won’t need to make use of it, I can say that I don’t think you should have any worries about doing so if necessary. But do make sure you have travel insurance so that going to a private clinic is a possibility as we were told that the public ones would have been a lot less pleasant. And being able to speak some French is also really helpful – it was all quite confusing and would have been even more so had we not been able to ask questions and more or less understand the answers.