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news
French ambulance (cropped, licensed CC BY SA 2.0 on Flickr by user MPD01605).jpgBritish man stuck in French hospital after serious cycling holiday crash
A cyclist from Derby is currently stuck in a hospital in Brittany after suffering a heart attack and crashing his bike while on a cycling holiday in the region.
Anthony Morris, a keen cyclist who travels to France with his bike every year, also suffered a bleed on the brain in the fall, which was caused by the heart attack, and has remained in hospital since, according to his daughter Charlotte.
22-year-old Charlotte, who has autism and relies on her father as a carer, has also told DerbyshireLive that, due to her father not having travel insurance, she needs to raise up to £10,000 to transport him back to the UK for heart surgery.
“I've been unable to see him, I'm missing him on a daily basis and he’s pretty much the only family I have,” she said.
“I lost my mum when I was eight weeks old in a house fire, so it’s just been me, my dad and the cats. We just want him home and to the Royal Derby Hospital so he can get his heart surgery and then get him back home so I can see him again.
“This is the first time he’s had an accident and he didn’t have travel insurance, so that’s why we’re in this situation.
“The longer my dad stays there, the more we have to pay the hospital. The hospital has also told us that it would be better for him if he could get back to the UK and be put in an English hospital so we can see him.”
Charlotte also says that the weeks spent in a hospital on his own have had a negative impact on her father’s mental health.
She continued: “He needs surgery but due to the accident he’s been fluctuating both emotionally and mentally. He’s now broken his own mobile phone so we can’t FaceTime him on that phone. He’s in no state for the surgery so they’re hoping they can get him back to the UK so he can, hopefully, recover quicker since he’ll be in a country he knows.”
While the 22-year-old claims that she will eventually be able to find the money to pay for the hospital bills in France, she says that she cannot afford the cost (estimated to be between £9,000 and £10,000) required to transport her father home with medical supervision, and has set up a GoFundMe page to help raise the necessary funds.
In a joint statement, the Foreign Office and the British Embassy in Paris confirmed that they are “providing assistance to a British man hospitalised in France”.
Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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18 comments
I am lucky to travelled abroad to cycle 3 times this year and in total with 22 people. About half were properly insured which surprised me. I assumed everyone would given we were going up and down mountains and on unfamiliar roads.
This guy is a carer. Perhaps this is his only break every year and it is done on a shoe string? I don't know but I wouldn't be so dismissive or judgemental about the situation without more information.
I would echo the always be insured comment but lets give some benefit of the doubt - just because he WAS uninsured doesnt mean he didnt think he WAS insured. Its also possible he's UNDER insured.
There's cockups and weasely insurance companies dont forget.
Certainly does happen, but I would have thought if that was the case here it would have been mentioned - for the sympathy points if nothing else.
I'm going to have to assume that road.cc haven't simply written up something that slipped through the email system's spam filters, but this reads like so many other scam emails.
While this is clearly a tragic story, it does never cease to amaze me that people go on holiday abroad - with no insurance - and then expect the consulate services, gofundme, kindness of strangers etc to bail them out of a shit situation.
My advise would be if you do not have insurance do not travel. Its quite simple.
Also compounded by being a carer - when you have that level of responsibility, it is essential to have cover (which as above, is inexpensive).
Never having had an overseas holiday, I had thought that travel insurance was something you are supposed to get if travelling anywhere outside the UK? I'm surprised that this guy didn't, but must be terrible to be lying there practically hearing the meter ticking...
Yes it is and even more so now we are not in the EU.
Yes, it's well worth having travel insurance to cover medical bills when travelling, especially as medical bills can be well beyond people's budgets. There's also the GHIC card with more or less replaces the older EHIC (pre-Brexit) card: https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/healthcare-abroad/apply-for-a-free-uk-global-health-insurance-card-ghic/
I don't know what level of cover that would have given in this scenario, but as it's free, it's worth applying for before travelling.
Definitely worth getting a GHIC card but always get travel insurance on top as even if it gets you completely free treatment it doesn't cover repatriation costs which, if you're seriously injured (i.e. need to come home by air ambulance), can easily cost over £100,000 from some parts of the world.
The basis of insurance is to cover the costs which you can't afford to pay yourself, so I have 3rd party insurance, house insurance, and medical insurance abroad. I do not have bicycle insurance, because a) I don't trust the insurers not to try to weasel out of paying if I haven't used an unobtanium lock attached to a vibranium cycle rack inside a police station. b) While it would hurt I can afford to replace my bike.
I can't afford open ended medical bills abroad
Amazing that someone who travels abroad EVERY YEAR decides it's not worth having.
£16 gets you a weeks cover with up to £5,000,000 medical bills cover
or pay £20 to have £2000 of personal property cover as well a £10m
I can't understand anyone not paying this.
My granny had to stop visiting us in the US sometime after age 90 because the travel insurance became unaffordable.
Pal of mine got married in the US fifteen years or so back at a time when I was recovering from fairly life-threatening illness and was still regarded as a major risk. For reasons too long to explain he got married on New Year's Eve, so we were already looking at somewhere in the region of £2500 for two returns to Washington which was pretty on our limit already...then I found the cheapest insurance I could get was £650 for a four-day trip. Sorry mate, going to have to be a present and our best wishes...
But we are talking about someone in their 40s/50s going to France
Mr Morris is reported to be 63 in the news report.
depends what you mean by supposed to. Obviously you should get it, but it is not mandatory like car insurance
Hey, Charlie, Willie.
How about helping one of your loyal subjects out? The cost to bring the poor lad back is a drop in the ocean to you.
And you arent asking the government why?.....