PRIVATE HOSPITALS. They Want Watching.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 274, 30 September 1905, Page 6

PRIVATE HOSPITALS. They Want Watching.

MR. Mason, Chief Health Officer for the colony, in his voluminous report, remarks inter alia that no private hospital should be controlled by any person who is neither a qualified medical doctor nor a registered nurse. It is a very excellent idea, but we would go further and insist that such hospitals, even though they were under expert supervision, should be subjected to the most rigid periodical examination, the periods to be irregular and unannounced. Assuming that the private hospitals of New Zealand are all that the friends of a patient might desire, there is still a temptation on the part of unskilled persons of unscrupulous character to run, a lucrative business that may have many evil results and may lead to crimes. There are, unhappily, many persons m any land only too willing for cash considerations to perform acts samples of which, when made public, stir the popular indignation. Then, too*, m a country where the baby is an unpopular institution, it is essential to our well-being that the ladies who carry on private lying-in institutions should be under most careful and intelligent supervision. • • ♦ Since our best asset is our children — vigorous, welcome infants — it is the sacred duty of the powers that be to see that the child-crop is large, and gets a good chance to thrive. Any evils there may be m connection with private nursing homes will not necessarily disappear even though one has to be a doctor or a nurse to "run" one. Doctors are fallible. How fallible a recent Auckland case clearly shows. The industrial person and the farming person is watched pretty closely in the country There are plenty of inspectors. • * * Qualifying for a medical degree doesn't strengthen the morality of the successful person. Doctors and nurses have many privileges. They should not be extended, and an M D. degree should not procure any immunity or privilege for the holder denied to his unskilled fellow. Mistakes will happen. Such mistakes, for instance, " as a party of young nurses "skylarking" in men's attire in the ward where a dying child lay and died. This in Australia. It might occur in New Zealand, and it is to avoid such possibilities that the keenest supervision and the broadest humanity are necessary. Possibly Dr. Mason has pondered all these things, and feels that the suggestion he

makes is absolutely necessary to ensure the proper conduct of private hospitals — and, incidentally, public hospitals too.