Very leisurely start to the day followed by a very leisurely breakfast. Its nice not to have to be packing up the car and heading out on the road again. We are here in Rochester for three days with Ilka and Dennis but not doing a lot of exploring but enjoying their company and catching up on the last 10-12 years.
Ilka and Dennis live less than a ten-minute drive away from the Mayo Clinic Campus so we decided to go down there and have a walk through.
The campus is huge and spread over a number of street blocks. What did surprise us was just how up to date the facilities were, and it was better than any five star hotel. Also, it is certainly one of the cleanest hospitals we have been into in a long time. They are constantly updating it and presently commencing a $5billion extension.
The Mayo Clinic gets its name from the Mayo family. The original founder was born 1819 in Salford near Manchester in which is an area we are familiar with as this where the industrial revolution began. He saw the injustices of the industrial revolution and left the UK for the US and from there the rest is history.
There are three Mayo campuses in the USA – Rochester (the original site), Florida and Scottsdale, Arizona.
Rochester has a population of 77,000 people, yet one million people per year go through the clinic. They accept private patients but also Medicaid and Medicare patients and of course many international clients. The ethos of the clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”. Also, the medical staff are all salaried and not paid per patient they see – a huge plus!!! The other big ideal is that the patient is treated holistically, and compartmentalised medicine is not practised – this has been a big beef of Di’s for many year.
Once coming home and inside from the very cold blustery weather we were greeted by Ginger, Finnegan and Toque. Dennis stayed home to look after the trio, but we did warn him before we left that Toque would howl, scream and cry whilst we were out. You could see he was dubious about this warning but on our return, he did mention that Toque was quietly howling!!! She was probably screaming at the top of her lungs as Dennis didn’t have his hearing aids in. Not sure if he will be that keen to look after her again.
Rowkin Rovings Blog 