Safety for Mothers

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 764, 10 September 1929, Page 8

Safety for Mothers

Urgent Need of Model Hospitals

AUTHORITATIVE medical writers Rave proved recently just how far New Zealand lags behind the world in the .science of obstetrics, and how important it is to the future of society that this leeway should be bridged without delay. Medical men welcome the grouping of two hospitals in Dunedin for training purposes, which is one step toward their ambition to see Dunedin equipped with a model hospital for midwifery training and research, and the other centres possessed of model maternity hospitals.

Justifiable pride has been expressed in the progress made by New Zealand in recent years toward greater antenatal safety, but an indictment published in the August number of the New Zealand Medical -Journal against the obstetrics in the Dominion leads to a belief that New Zealand is indeed poorly-equipped for the preservation of its enviable reputation. The secretary of the New Zealand Obstetrical Society, Dr. Doris C. Gordon, in a review of the training of the New Zealand obstetrician, quotes the words of Alex Bourne upon the importance of this training in England, and applies the remarks to New Zealand conditions. Bourne indicts the standard of British training as insufficient. But Dr. Gordon says that, if this indictment be true, words would fail Bourne to describe the insufficiency of New Zealand training, for a graduate of our school who has tried in five years of general practice to acquire some degree of obstetric skill and judgment, can go to Great Britain and find to his surprise that the senior students are familiar with obstetrical facts and clinical signs which to him (presumably an experienced practitioner) are new and advantageous. INSUFFICIENT TRAINING How utterly inadequate, then, Dr. Gordon asks, would Bourne term the 30 lectures on midwifery and the attendance at 20 maternity case (not the personal conduction of 20 cases), of which four must be attended under proper supervision, which has hitherto been scheduled as the sole preparation for the New Zealander before he is certified fit to deal with obstetrics, normal and abnormal, in lonely rural towns or remote farming homesteads? Four years have passed since a member of the New Zealand Obstetrical Society pointed out to the authorities that, while in New Zealand there were many house-surgeon positions where the graduates acquired their experience in anaesthetics, surgery and medicine, there was not one residential post in an obstetric hospital anywhere in the Dominion. “Four years have passed since this deficiency was noted,” the writer continues, “but as yet there is no sigh of the matter being remedied. If, as Bourne says, the English graduate has to call upon his training in surgery and medicine to help him through his obstetrical emergencies, how much

more so does this apply to the New Zealander ? “When our New Zealand graduates emerge from an obstetrical unit, which in structural dignity equals the best general surgical unit we have in the Dominion, which is graced by a fulltime professor and staffed by a resident tutor, which has its own outpatient ante-natal department, its own X-ray plant, its own pathological and bio-chemical laboratory, its own museum and library, then, and then only, can we expect them to have that living interest in the subject w-hich will culminate in immediate sound judgment and the high degree of skill which is necessary before much reduction can be made in New Zealand’s preventable maternal mortality. "A deputation from the New Zealand Obstetrical Society and from the general assembly of New Zealand Graduates of Medicine, waited upon the Minister of Health in Februarylast, urging upon the Government of this country the immediate necessity of erecting an up-to-date obstetric hospital in Dunedin for the better teaching of midwifery. The Cabinet’s reply to this request is awaited with anxious interest. EVERYBODY’S DUTY “But not only to the Government of this country should an appeal be made for funds for the adequate equipment of an up-to-date obstetrical unit in the New Zealand Medical School. Every wealthy and every thinking citizen of this Dominion should know that the medical profession can only move as fast toward the goal of assured obstetrical safety as they themselves will allow us to move. “Hampered in student day's by a poverty-stricken obstetrical department, hampered later by a lack of residential obstetrical experience, and hampered finally and perpetually by a non-co-operative and distrustful public spirit, the New Zealand midwifery service toils along, awaiting the day when the public of this Dominion wiil wake up, put its hands in its pockets and give to Dunedin a model hospital, endowing the same sufficiently to provide for a full-time professor, research workers, etc., while it gives to the other main centres model maternityhospitals, which will not only be a boon to the working mothers of the community-, but will provide residential obstetrical posts and ultimately serve as post-graduate schools for doctors and nurses.”