THE HOSPITAL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26618, 14 November 1947, Page 4

THE HOSPITAL

The Otago Hospital Board has the distinction of so managing its business that the cost per bed in its institutions is one of the highest, if not the highest, in New Zealand. It is for the public to decide whether the service obtained from the institutions within the board’s area is commensurate with the heavy and rising cost. By such mundane considerations, and not by extravagant claims and potentially costly promises, must the hospital administration be judged. The record is grandiose, but in practical achievement forbidding. It is true, as a Labour Party pamphlet points out, that the Hospital Board (assisted by a grant from the State covering more than half the cost) has built a new massage department with Olympic standard swimming baths attached. The baths became part of a priority work, but apart from their use by patients they have not been available for the recreation of the hospital staff, as was promised, and they are now to be used, on a semi-exclusive basis, by a swimming club. It is indeed an expensive system which charges the State, and an entire hospital rating area, with the cost of a swimming pool for a city club. There have been valuable appointments to the hospital medical staff. This is in line with the SocialistCommunist policy of centralisation and control of all social services. But the out-patients’ department is a congeries of holes and corners, and depressing “temporary” structures, cramped and uncomfortable, in which waiting time is measured by the hour; the Talboys Home is a Dickensian type of poor-house; the open hospital wards are so crowded that beds overflow down their centres, in violation of the privacy of patients; so successful has the State been in shutting down private maternity homes that erstwhile general wards, urgently needed for the sick, serve as public maternity wards, while the Hospital Board feverishly seeks out private dwellings and plans further “ temporary ” buildings as nurses’ quarters and maternity homes. The nursing staff is overworked, but certainly not overpaid, while medical staff increases in numbers and cost, very largely to do work which, under the old honorary system, was undertaken by experienced doctors gratis. And over the whole sprawling, chaotic network of hospital services the claiming hand of institutionalism extends its grasp, cold, impersonal, pervasive; but not strikingly efficient.

It is this large and mechanised warehouse of healing without humanity, this production-line infirmary, that the regnant Hospital Board chairman and his hand-picked candidates offer to the people of Dunedin in support of their plea to be allowed its future control. Their

pride in it is somewhat pathetic; but the public, for whom the hospital is the focus of so many little human crises, can scarcely feel sorry for them. People look for calm comfort in hospitals, which it is in the genius of man to provide. With the present nursing staff and doctors, the Dunedin Hospital could become a human institution again; but it will never become so, whatever the volume in pounds and promises poured upon it, under such a system of Socialist regimentation and medical nepotism as the Labour Party candidates have as their ideal.