A travel account of an II-city tour of British geriatric units

A country in which greetings cards that congratulate people on their 70th, 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays are available in nearly every kiosk must be an interesting country for a geriatrician to visit, and the United Kingdom has been visited many times by foreign geriatricians since Marjorie Warren started her pioneering geriatric wards in the West Middlesex Hospital. In the Netherlands, this gero-tourism to the UK started more than 40 years ago. To be precise, it was 1955 when the first Dutch geriatrician, Dr Schreuder— who later became the first professor of medical gerontology in the Netherlands—and the first Dutch researcher in geriatrics, Dr Van Zonneveld, came to London to meet Dr Warren. She was pictured as a heroine in the short article they wrote about their journey for a Dutch journal [1]. Following Schreuder and Van Zonneveld's trip, many Dutch geriatricians have crossed the North Sea to learn from the UK experience. Following this tradition, I was very happy to be given the opportunity to visit my own heroes of British geriatrics by the Netherlands programme for Research on Ageing (NESTOR).