About Takecare Medical Clinic
Takecare Medical Clinic runs three clinics on this island — Bang Tao in the north-west, Kata in the
south and Patong between them — and all three are open every hour of every day. English-speaking doctors, on duty 24 hours a day.
Nothing needs booking, no referral is required, and nobody is asked whether they live in Thailand.
Walk in, or ring and somebody comes to you.
Why three buildings rather than one
Phuket is larger than most visitors expect and the traffic is considerably worse than the map
suggests. The hill road out of Patong crawls in the rain, the run up from Kata takes longer than
anybody plans for, and a clinic that is forty minutes away at four in the afternoon is not really
open to you at all.
So the answer was to stop expecting people to travel. On Bandon Road in Cherngtalay, serving Bang Tao, Layan, Surin and the north-west coast. On Kedkwan Road at Karon, covering Kata, Karon and the southern beaches. On Prachanukroh Road in Patong, minutes from Bangla Road and the beachfront.
Each carries the same equipment and keeps the same hours, so the right one is simply the nearest —
see the walk-in clinics.
Open at the hours things actually go wrong
Outpatient departments run on office hours. Pharmacies shut. Illness does not consult any of
those timetables — it turns up two hours after a late dinner, or on the last morning with a taxi
already booked, or at four in the morning with a child who is burning up and two parents in a
strange room with no idea whether this is serious.
Somebody answers at every hour, public holidays included, and the doors are never locked. Being
woken is not an imposition here — it is most of the job — see
doctor on call.
What a typical week produces
Sun is always the largest category. People arrive from a northern winter, lose an afternoon to
a lounger without ever feeling especially hot, and turn up that evening with
skin well past the sore stage or with
heat exhaustion nobody saw coming.
Stomachs follow around day three — food poisoning
and travellers’ diarrhoea between them account
for more visits than anything else. Temperatures that want
dengue excluded before anybody sleeps properly. Riders
off rented scooters on the coast roads, usually arriving with both
gravel rash and the
exhaust burn on one calf that seems to be issued with the machine. And
people wanting a signed certificate or
paperwork for a claim, generally a good deal later
than would have been sensible.
Who comes in
Families out of the beachfront hotels at Bang Tao and Karon. Couples in villas around Layan and
Cherngtalay. People on long stays through the cool months. And a steady stream out of Patong at
hours when nothing else is open.
Hardly any of them carry medical records, almost none read Thai, and every one of them would
like a plain answer about what is wrong and what it will cost before saying yes to anything. None
of that makes a patient difficult — it describes the ordinary case here — see
English-speaking doctors.
What each branch can do
- Examination and diagnosis without an appointment — walk-in clinics
- Urgent treatment with oxygen, injectables, adrenaline and monitoring
- Bloods drawn and reported the same day, dengue antigen and platelet counts among them
- Wounds cleaned then closed with glue, strips or sutures, and reviewed afterwards
- Burns of every kind, from kitchens to exhaust pipes
- Fluid into a vein when the stomach has stopped accepting anything
- Children, who account for a striking proportion of what walks in overnight
- Vaccination, including the course that starts the day an animal breaks skin
- Prescriptions replaced for medication lost, spoiled or still in a missing bag
- Certificates, flight clearance and insurer paperwork
Coming to you instead
Plenty of people should not be in a car at all — a vomiting child, somebody who cannot stand
without the room moving, anyone who has been up all night with a fever. For them the sensible
arrangement is the other way round, and a doctor arrives at the hotel or villa with the same
equipment — see doctor hotel visits.
That covers the resorts, condominiums and villa compounds across the island, at any hour, and it
takes around an hour, depending on where you are.
What a clinic cannot do
Scans, operating theatres, overnight beds, specialist opinions and rabies immunoglobulin all
require a hospital. Where one of those is the honest answer, you will hear it immediately rather
than being treated for an hour first.
The private hospitals are concentrated around Phuket Town and the middle of the island. Getting
you to the right one, with the department telephoned in advance and the transport arranged, is part
of the work rather than something handed back to you — see
hospital transfer and referral.
Flights, and the last morning
The terminal sits up at the northern end of the island, a long way from most of the beaches.
Waking up ill three hours before a fourteen-hour flight poses a genuine question, and it is one
better settled by an examination than argued about in the back of a transfer — see
airport medical assistance and
pre-flight checks.
Money, discussed first
You are told the price before anything happens, and nothing gets added later without somebody
saying so first. Card or cash at any hour, and everyone leaves with an itemised receipt and an
English report, which is the pair of documents nearly every policy asks to see.
Say at the outset that you are insured. It alters what the doctor writes while you are both
still in the room, and that is a far easier thing to arrange than chasing paperwork across time
zones six weeks later.
Part of a wider group
Takecare Medical Clinic belongs to Takecare Clinic group, which operates across Phuket, Krabi and Chon Buri. Start a course
of treatment at one branch and any other can continue it, so leaving mid-way through means a
telephone call between colleagues rather than a wallet of notes you are expected to carry through
an airport yourself.
When to skip all of this and dial 1669
Some things need an ambulance rather than a clinic, and the list is short enough to remember.
Pain or pressure in the chest. Fighting for air while sitting still. A face gone slack or speech
gone strange. Somebody knocked on the head who then starts vomiting or stops making sense. Blood
that firm pressure will not slow. A fit. Anybody pulled from water. Anybody who will not wake.
For any of those, 1669 — free, answered around the clock, English available —
and do it before ringing anyone else — see
emergency medical care.