NOT PRACTICABLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 134, 8 June 1937, Page 8

NOT PRACTICABLE

HUTT VALLEY HOSPITAL COST TOO GREAT The view that it would not be practicable to have a hospital in the Hutt Valley for general purposes was expressed by Mr. A. G. Stephenson, a widely-travelled expert in the designing of hospitals, in a public lecture given in the Mayfair Theatre, Upper Hutt, last evening. The lecture, which was arranged by Mr. J. Purvis, local representative on the Hospital Board, was attended by the Mayor (Mr. A. J. McCurdy), several borough councillors. Councillor' S. Blackley (Hutt County Council), the chairman of the Wellington Hospital Board (Mr. J. Glover) and Dr. A. R. Thorne (superintendent of the Wellington Hospital). Mr. Glover said, that the hospital question was an. acute one in the Hutt Valley. Mr. Stephenson was the architect who designed the new Wellington Hospital, and he was now getting the plans ready. Mr. V. P. Haughton (the board's architect) and he had been busy up till the present time, but after that it would rest with the ratepayers of Wellington city and the surrounding townships. Parts of the present building were sixty years old, other parts forty, and the most modern portion, built about fifteen years ago, was mostly taken up with, administrative offices. The building 'was' out oi date and wrongly planned, judged by modern standards. Mr. Stephenson said that although he had been associated with many hospital boards and governing bodies he had never before met with such pluck and foresight as was displayed by the Wellington Hospital Board and the Government. The modern way'of looking at hospitals, he said, was how long was the patient to remain in bed before he got back into his own place in the community. There was not only the loss of wages on the part of the person in hospital, but the loss of profit to the community. Mr. Stephenson stressed , the poinf that in a hospital of from 60 to 600 beds of a general acute nature, 76 per cent of the. area was devoted to other purposes than the wards in which the patients were placed. He did not take in the nurses' home or the boiler house. The proportion of general sickness in a community was about 5 per thousand, and taking the population of the Huti Valley as 30,000 this would mean a hospital for 150 people. Taking intc consideration maternity cases, etc. (and excluding mental cases), the hospital would contain less than 200 beds. The cost of construction would be between £200,000 and £250,000. It had to be remembered that 25 or 26 per cent. oJ the cases required specialised care. In a really modern hospital complete instruments1 and apparatus were needed The time had not yet arrived for the construction of a unit hospital in the Hutt Valley. However, the district could ! have a casualty centre and s well-equipped maternity centre without going to the cost of a big hospital according to his point of view. Mr. Stephenson said that Britain, the Commonwealth of Australia, and New Zealand had lagged behind in hospital development, but millions ol pounds were now being spent in Bri tain for this purpose, and the new hos pital would put New Zealand in lint with world progress. Mr. Stephenson showed a number o: \nteresting lantern slides,. and wa; '>eartily thanked for his address.