MATERNITY CARE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 227, 25 September 1929, Page 21

MATERNITY CARE.

BRITISH SCHEME PROPOSED.

FOR ENGLAND AND WALES

B.M.A. SUGGESTIONS. A proposal for the establishment of a national maternity service scheme for England and Wales is made in a memorandum issued by the British Medical Association. ■ The aim of the association is to provide the services of a midwife and a doctor, the doctor to be responsible in each case in all its stages. It believes that normal cases can be treated at home and that maternal mortality and morbidity can be greatly reduced by constant supervision by a doctor at the critical time and for some time after. The persons covered by the scheme of the association would be: — (a) Persons now entitled to maternity benefits under the National Health Insurance Acts—i.e., insured women and the wives of insured men. (b) Persons who but for unemployment having caused their insurance to lapse would otherwise have been entitled to maternity benefit. (c) Persons who are in business on their own account, and are therefore not engaged in insurable employment, but who are of similar economic status to insured persons. (d) Persons engaged in certain excepted employments such as \mder the Crown., any local or public authority, railway or other statutory company, where provision for sickness by "means of such schemes as superannuation is approved by the Minister of Health. Cost of the Scheme. The total gross cost of the scheme is estimated to be £2,100,000 a year, of which £1,250,000 would be paid in fees to midwives and about £550,000 to doctors. Certain institutional treatment would be granted wherever necessary. It is estimated by the British Medical Association that £750.000 is at present expended in connection with the halfmillion births that the scheme would provide for, and that the State and municipalities; spend an equal sum. The association points out that since so large a proportion of the women to benefit are eithpr themselves insured under National Health Insurance Acts or are the wives of insured men, it would seem that for these the service could be provided on an insurance basis via the National Health Insurance machinery. An additional contribution on belmlf of employer and worker together of 4d per week for each insured person, with 2d per -week by the State, would provide all the money. In this insurance method the money would be collected by stamps through approved societies, and the benefit could bn administered by collaboration between the local authority and the local insurance committee, one of which deals noAv with midwives and anto-r.atal el'nics and the other with the medical benefit of the National Health Insurance Acts.