I read with interest the front-page article "French doc to the rescue" (The Argus, August 18).

This came at the end of a week when the national Press had been full of reports about British people seeking immediate, quality health care in other European countries.

How sad and how very arrogant that a Brighton Health Care NHS Trust spokesman commented: "Having highly-specialised diagnostic treatments undertaken in a foreign country may not always lead to the best outcome."

Clearly, he had missed the point because, in this case, Mr Cooper had been correctly and quickly diagnosed in France when the Royal Sussex County Hospital had failed to do so in three years.

Isn't it time the providers of medical care in the UK admitted some of their European colleagues are at least as competent as themselves and stopped this xenophobic nonsense as if every doctor and hospital across the Channel was still prescribing treatment with leeches?

Recent reports by both the World Health Organisation and The Lancet showed the UK at No 18 and 25 in the world in terms of best health care - well below France.

Given the appalling state of the NHS, if we can learn something from the way our European neighbours do things, is there really any place for this arrogance?

-Julia Berg, Great College Street, Brighton