PRIVACY IN HOSPITALS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 611, 13 March 1929, Page 8

PRIVACY IN HOSPITALS

TWO contentious principles of hospital service—paymept of * visiting doctors and the establishment of private paying wards in public hospitals—were discussed by the Hon. A. J. Stallworthy, Minister of Public Health, at the Hospital Boards’ Conference yesterday, and he professed a sneaking regard for both. It is true that, as Mr. Stallworthy stated, the position has to be faced; but he may realise later that the position has to he studied very fully and carefully before a commitment on general lines is warranted.

Converted by the doctrines of such ambassadors as Doctor MacEacliern (Canada) and Doctor Mayo (U.S.), the Health Deparment has long since admitted its affection for private wards. It has the support of the new Minister, just as it had the encouragement, at least, of his predecessor; hut it knows perfectly well that any attempt to give the principle legislative sanction would be met with the intense hostility of a section in the House, including the whole of the Labour Party. Somehow, the Labour Party associates private wards with social divisions and caste barriers. Be it right or wrong in this notion, it has been supported therein by men who are now Mr. Stallworthy’s colleagues, and the position is therefore complicated. Unquestionably, as Mr. Stallworthy says, the payment of honorary medical staffs and the establishment of paying wards are interwoven. The one is really the corollary of the other. Private wards, however, have been most successful in the country of greatest wealth, the U.S.A. There the large fees paid by the well-to-do help to maintain the wards and facilities set apart for the less fortunate; but in New Zealand, where there is a larger middle-class and fewer people of great wealth, the plan might not work so well. The private ward system would certainly be a failure if the fees were much higher than those already charged in public hospitals. The existing scale of fees is high enough, except to a few who can afford real luxuries in their sickness. Under the circumstances it has yet to be shown how adoption of the principle would cover the many weaknesses in the present system of financing hospitals. It would give people a better return for their outlay, and above all it would give them privacy, that precious gift to the sick. But whether it would really ease the burden on the local authorities, and through them, on the groaning taxpayer, is a question on which Mr. Stallworthy should endeavour to satisfy himself very fully before he commits himself to any programme of experiments.