HOSPITAL FINANCE

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 140, 11 December 1930, Page 8

HOSPITAL FINANCE

PROBLEM IN AUSTRALIA

(From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, 4th December. The closing of beds in Koyal Prince Alfred Hospital—one of Sydney's leading public hospitals and one of the bestknown of such institutions in Australiais one of the indirect fruits of short-sight-ed Governmental interference. The Royal Prince Alfred and other Sydney hospitals have been maintained almost wholly on voluntary subscriptions. They are paid Government subsidies, but it is the voluntary system that has been their- mainstay. With a great flourish of trumpets some time ago, the previous Government established a Hospital Committee; but about the only effect of it so far has been to vitiate tlio voluntary system.

People who in the past have cheerfully helped to keep the hospitals going, ■with testamentary settlements or other gifts, now turn round and tell the Government, in effect, that if it elects to run the hospitals it should finance them. It is because the Government is. now faced with one of its most serious problems, that of maintaining unimpaired the great humanitarian work o£ its hospitals, in i'aee pi' •educed voluntary subscriptions arid other burdens, that it is inclined to turn hopefully as a last resort to a State lottery. That that may mean a further slump in voluntary contributions is not improbable.