Health system in danger, says professor

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 9

Health system in danger, says professor

New Zealand health care is in danger of falling behind the rest of the Western world, according to a leading New Zealand doctor, Professor Don Beaven. Professor Beaven, head of medicine at the Christchurch Clinical School, has just returned from eight months on overseas study leave. His main interest was diabetes research but he sounded a general warning for New Zealand if it did not match overseas trends towards decentralisation of health decisions and more medical research.

“It is not possible to stand still,” he said yesterday. “We may think we are maintaining standards but what we are doing is falling behind.” New Zealand was a small country without the resources available to other health systems, but it was a question of how much New Zealanders valued their own health, he said. He drew a comparison between Christchurch and the same-sized city of Geneva. The Swiss city had replaced its hospital buildings and resited its medical teaching and research facilities together — all in the last 15 years. “They have gone two steps ahead of us in the years that we have been struggling to put up some buildings to make do,” he said. Professor Beaven had expected to see the foundations under way for the stage IH redevelopment of Christchurch Hospital. Instead, he was amazed at the lack of progress. The Geneva changes had been accomplished in the same way as if the people of Christchurch had decided needed and spent taxes Without going back to

central government in Wellington, Professor Beaven said.

“This is a major costsaving because you do not have the huge central apparatus of a federal health department,” he said. New Zealand hospital boards were ideally suited to taking on more decisions but they were not being used.

Instead, Professor Beaven likened Health Department rulings to Russian imperial orders, in some respects. They were handed down from the highest government levels “as if from someone next to God,” but it was impossible to find their source.

ironically, even a bureaucratic and Socialist nation such as Yugoslavia had a more flexible health system than New Zealand, he said. Other countries were also taking advantage of poor job prospects in the economc recession by employing more doctors in research, an investment that led to a long-term improvement in medical care. At the same time it kept valuable medical expertise from being lost to the United States, where specialists were in demand. People overseas were also more aware that they had the ability to maintain their health, particularly in the United States. Professor Beaven said that if American patients did not like their standard of hospital treatment they went to the next meeting of the hospital trustees and made changes, borrowed the money and built new facilif ics “in a sense I think this is starting to happen in New Zealand.” But there was stiO long way to go, he said.