Harrowing tale of British tourist, Dean Penson, stranded in a Thai hospital in a nightmarish encounter with suspected leukaemia. His best friend paints a horrific picture of blood stains, needles strewn about and deaths nearby. With the hospital bill soaring, friends launched a £10,000 emergency fund, which exposes Thailand’s problem with foreign tourist care. The story is a cautionary tale, demanding urgent government action on a promised tourist insurance levy.
Thailand’s tourism prospects, already suffering with low demand from China and cancelled flight slots, this week, were dealt another blow when a leading UK newspaper featured the plight of a severely debilitated British tourist in Phuket to raise emergency funds to pay for yet another hospital bill for a Western tourist in Thailand whose life is in peril. It comes just weeks after the new Minister of Tourism and Sports promised to expedite a long-awaited foreign tourism levy which would provide for a fund for stricken foreign tourists and universal emergency insurance cover, but which continues to be postponed by officials.
On the picturesque holiday island of Phuket, where vibrant beaches meet azure waters, a British holidaymaker’s paradise has turned into a living nightmare.
Dean Penson, a 41-year-old labourer from Southend-on-Sea, is stranded in a dire state, battling a suspected case of leukaemia in the chaotic throes of a busy public ward in Thailand’s Vachira Phuket Hospital.
Friends have launched a desperate £10,000 fundraising plea, another online effort, to get him back to the UK, narrating a harrowing tale of a hospital that his 42-year-old best pal claims to be a ‘horrific’ situation where his sick friend has been lying in a ward where people have died near him.
Holiday to sunny Thailand that began on November 9th in Southend-on-Sea turned into a living nightmare thousands of miles away in Phuket
Dean’s ordeal began innocently enough. On November 9th, he embarked on a few weeks’ break with friends, seeking respite in Thailand and the beautiful island of Phuket, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.
However, fate had a cruel twist in store, just nine days later. Around November 15th, Dean’s health spiralled out of control, prompting an urgent visit to a hospital near the island’s busy and colourful old quarter.
The diagnosis was grim — an alarmingly low blood count with gnawing fears that the UK labourer could be suffering from the deadly cancer of the blood-forming tissues of the body, Leukaemia.
Ben Page, Dean’s best mate who has been with him through this nightmarish journey, expressed his concern about what he saw as dire conditions at Vachira Phuket Hospital.
UK man’s best friend described conditions in one ward at Phuket’s main hospital, a respected care centre, as third world or like something from Gaza
‘It’s pretty horrendous, the conditions are so bad. There’s blood everywhere, there’s needles everywhere,’ Ben lamented, painting a vivid picture of the treatment ward his friend was in at Phuket’s main hospital in a busy public healthcare environment.
‘He’s just got worse and worse, he’s really anaemic. We’ve been best mates since we were 15. It was just horrendous to see him like this. He couldn’t see well out of his eyes because he had a haemorrhage behind them. That was causing him to bleed from them,’ remarked his overwrought friend to popular UK daily tabloid, the Daily Mirror. ‘His bloods are just so low, which could be leukaemia, but I’m not really sure. He had 18 to 20 bags of blood and platelets. His platelets are just totally depleted. But it’s just horrendous at the hospital. He’s at a high risk of brain haemorrhage. It’s been horrible seeing him like this.’
Nevertheless, the Vachira Phuket Hospital was established in 1920 and is the main public hospital and indeed the centre of the public health system in Phuket.
On the positive side, the hospital has a good local reputation and played a key part in efforts during the pandemic to control the COVID-19 outbreak on the island.
Hundreds of reviews of the hospital give it a three out of five-star rating with polarising reviews ranging from one-star warnings to lavish five-star praise for the care provided by individual hospital doctors to the less well-off in Phuket.
This is the main hospital on the holiday island, classified as a regional hospital by the Ministry of Public Health in Bangkok. The hospital is used as a trainee education centre to train doctors in Thailand to tend to rural patients.
Hospital is a leading training centre but UK man’s friend claims that he sometimes did not have access to toilet paper and conditions lacked privacy
Students at Vachira Phuket Hospital are enrolled at the School of Medicine at Walailak University whose main campus is in the southern Thai province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, which has training centres throughout the kingdom.
At length, this week, the distraught tourist, helplessly watching his best friend’s condition after returning from the United Kingdom to be there for Dean, appeared very anxious.
Mr Page claimed there was no access to toilet paper, with patients washed with hoses in addition to a lack of curtains in the public treatment area offering no privacy.
He told the UK’s Daily Mirror, read by over 32 million in Britain and around the globe, that this exposed Dean to the grim reality of others dying just feet away.
Amid the nightmare, Dean’s deteriorating health paints a devastating picture.
Multiple transfusions and suspicion of leukaemia have left him weakened, his blood count plummeting, and his platelets depleted. Ben, visibly distressed, detailed the agonising scenes: ‘His bloods are just so low, which could be leukaemia, but I’m not really sure.’
Hospital bill currently at £5,000 which the labourer cannot afford and it is estimated he will need double his amount to pay for his care in Phuket
Dean’s health crisis is not just medical; it’s financial. A hospital bill of approximately £5,000 has already accrued, a sum unaffordable for the labourer.
In Thailand, foreigners are expected to pay for healthcare, which is provided at economical rates even where the tourist cannot pay, based on traditional humanitarian principles which are part of the country’s culture but there are limits and the bills must ultimately be paid.
His best friend and father of two, Ben, who runs the Combat Charity Challenge business at home, grapples with the mounting expenses and the prospect of additional A&E costs in the United Kingdom.
Hope flickers in the form of Dean being declared fit to fly in the coming days, but the challenges don’t end there.
The urgent need for funds to facilitate his return looms large, as Dean’s health hangs in the balance.
The distressing saga unfolds, prompting friends to rally for support, making a heartfelt plea for contributions to reunite Dean with his homeland and access the healthcare he desperately needs.
Story a cautionary tale about how travel insurance is a sine qua non for all travellers to Thailand and an urgent need for the Thai government to act
Dean Penson’s story serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability that holidaymakers face in Thailand and the critical importance of travel insurance, an oversight by the tourist himself that has plunged a dream vacation into a grim fight for life and resources.
However, the fundraising campaign launched by Dean’s friend Ben Page is yet another black eye for foreign tourism in Thailand as it highlights the absence of the government’s promised universal foreign tourist insurance coverage based on a tourist insurance fund linked with a levy which has been promised or mooted for over a decade.
Thailand could introduce tourist tax or levy next year as an expert group begins to examine plans
However, the problem is the proposal continues to be postponed.
The levy plan is for an entry fee to Thailand of ฿300 or just over $9, which would offer emergency health coverage to all tourists for 30 days after they arrive in the Kingdom.
Tourism minister promised to expedite tourism levy in October after murder of a Chinese tourist exposed lack of abolished compensation fund
In October, the newly appointed Minister of Tourism and Sports, Sudawan Wang-Suphakitkosol, promised that the levy would be fast-tracked, despite a continuous series of promises by her Ministry over the last four years which have not been kept.
The latest reason for the delay is a change in the collection process for the levy which it is now proposed will be collected manually at the arrivals points in the Kingdom, reportedly with the use of a website app and airport kiosks.
Tourism fee fund to be fast-tracked after payouts to families in the Siam Paragon mass shooting
14-year-old boy murdered Chinese tourist in a terror attack on Bangkok’s Siam Paragon Centre
In October, the Minister, Ms Sudawan was forced to address the issue as an internal fund to compensate tourists who were the victims of criminal activity, was found to have been abolished by the previous government.
Significantly, this became news after the Siam Paragon Shopping Centre mass shooting in Bangkok which saw a 34-year-old Thai-Chinese mother of twins Zhao Jinnan, murdered by a teenager who is currently receiving psychiatric treatment and whose case has yet to be resolved before the courts.
Concerned tourism industry leaders fully support the levy but are concerned about how 80% of the funds will be used by the government once it flows in
Concerned tourism industry leaders in Thailand have called for the foreign tourism levy to be introduced as soon as possible with the fund for insurance only accounting for 20% of the charge.
However, behind the scenes, it is reported that as well as the logistical challenges involved in the collection of the money, including officials who are keen to avoid confusion at airports, there is also squabbling over how the funds collected from the larger proportion, or 80% of the income stream, will be applied.
In theory, the government has proposed that this will be used for boosting tourism infrastructure and facilities in the Kingdom, but private foreign tourism industry leaders are sceptical that the money will be syphoned off to defray other government expenses.
Media stories like that of Dean Penson do irreparable damage to confidence and the perception of Thailand abroad yet successive governments do nothing
In the meantime, coverage of the unfolding story in Phuket is, without a doubt, damaging to Thailand’s image not only in the United Kingdom but across the English-speaking world due to the proliferation of British media across Europe, the United States and down under in Australia.
3.89% of the 2,241,195 visitors in December 2022 or 87,376 tourists were British.
These are among the higher-spending Western tourists, which the Kingdom has failed to attract in large numbers since the shutdown due to the pandemic crisis in April 2020.
With tourism expenditure per capita currently down by 14% on the 2019 levels from four years ago, in 2022, Thailand only attracted 11,153,026 foreign tourists and this year’s target of 30 million is set to be missed.
Analysts are now downgrading the country’s projections to the end of December to somewhere approximately 27.5 million visitors.
Thailand needs more high-spending Western tourists
Last year, among the 11,153,026 visitors, 4.60 million were from Malaysia, India, Singapore, Korea and Laos representing 41.26% of arrivals.
The preponderance of Asian tourists has increased during 2023 with the reopening of the Chinese market but this has brought disappointment with the kingdom only on target to achieve between 55 and 60% of what it set out when it introduced a free visa waiver scheme in September.
The reason for the downturn in Thailand’s prospects in China has been attributed to negative PR coverage about the country and its links with criminality as well as a downturn in the communist state’s economy.
Media reports like the one now circulating about Dean Penson, a working man from Southend-on-Sea in the United Kingdom, are highly detrimental to Thailand’s prospects of attracting more Western visitors.
It is just what the kingdom does not need, and it has been caused by delay and dithering by this government and previous governments in following through on a pragmatic proposal for self-financed universal medical emergency insurance coverage for visitors to the country.
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Further reading:
Tourism fee fund to be fast-tracked after payouts to families in the Siam Paragon mass shooting
Negative reaction and horror at Thailand’s plan to charge foreigners more than locals at hotels
Thailand could introduce tourist tax or levy next year as expert group begins to examine plans
UK man stranded in Thailand facing a £100,000 medical bill may be rescued by crowd funding success
Battlefield friends help UK man and wife escape medical bill of £12k in Thailand. Now safely home
