“Day Hospital Needed For Elderly Folk”

Press, Volume C, Issue 29516, 18 May 1961, Page 10

“Day Hospital Needed For Elderly Folk”

A "day hospital” is needed in Christchurch 1® give daytime care to elderly persons living with younger relatives. This is one suggestion made by the' medical superintendent of Burwood Hospital (Dr. J. H. Mclntyre) in an article on Christchurch geriatric services in the “New Zealand Medical Journal.” The elderly folk would go home at night to be “tucked up” by their own people, he adds. Dr. Mclntyre also believes that the Tuarangi Home for sick elderly men should be moved from Ashburton to Christchurch and combined with the Jubilee Home for elderly women, which, he says, will have to be shifted from its present location in Woolston because it is in an industrial area. The combined home should be for walking-case patients who could look after themselves, the aged sick —112 in these homes —being accommodated

in the main hospitals, where a new ward block of ISO beds would be necessary "if any impression were to be made on the geriatric wait-ing-Urt.” Confused Patients Dr. Mclntyre says that a special ward for mentally confused senile patients should be created at Burwood Hospital, where many of these patients are noisy and disturb other patients and have to be accommodated in the day room at night. The ward would be intermediate between the chronic ward and the mental hospital. This provision would be most desirable from the point of view of the patients' families, Dr. Mclntyre adds, since committal to a mental hospital involves certification, and “there is still a stigma attached to a family which has a member in a mental institution.” Often the fact has to be revealed for employment purposes, he adds, which can be highly embarrassing.

The day hospital which Dr. Mclntyre envisages would be built around a physiotherapy and occupational therapy department In addition, he says, a remedial kitchen would be helpful, where old people could cook themselves a • meal with a minimum of supervision. "The initial cost of such a day hospital might be considerable, but it would be much less than maintaining a patient in hospital.” says Dr. Mclntyre. “It would maintain supervision of a patient after discharge, and would do away with the need for admission in some cases. It would teach a patient to become self-supporting after a stroke, and by increasing social contacts would improve the mental attitude of lonely, elderly chronically-sick patients.”

It is necessary, he believes, that at least a small experimental day hospital should be built in a central position in Christchurch to deal with the rehabilitation of the hemiplegic (semi-paralysed) and rheumatoid patients. Bed Shortage In England and Wales, an average of 1.2 beds per 1000 population for chronically sick aged patients other than the mentally sick has been found adequate. Dr. Mclntyre says, so long as there is a fully effective geriatric service and adequate domiciliary and welfare services. In Greater Christchurch, with a population of 215,000, this would amount to about 260 beds. Outside the main hospitals there is accommodation for 197 patients, but 72 of these are at Tuarangi, 50 miles away, while the Jubilee

Home, which cares for 47 patients, is situated in an industrial area and will have to be evacuated. ‘This means we are at best 63 beds short, and another 119 beds short at the worst,” he says. “The latter is the more likely, for the reasons mentioned above. "In Canterbury as a whole there are 11,172 persons over 75 years (on 1956 figures), and more than one in five of these will require institutional care.”