The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1930 NURSES AND POLITICS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1073, 10 September 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1930 NURSES AND POLITICS

A DISTINGUISHED member of the House of Commons once described it as a place in which “a man could neither work nor rest.” Less distinguished observers of the work of Legislatures all over the world today might add quite fairly that the average Parliament lias become a place in which politicians can neither do the right thing well nor .make a had thing better. The truth of that description was demonstrated in the House of Representatives yesterday when the Health Committee returned a sheaf of amendments to the Hon. A. J. Stallworthy’s Bill which aims at extending the right of training nurses to such private hospitals as would he approved by the Nurses and Midwives Registration Board on which neither hospital boards nor private hospitals have direct, representation. It was not surprising that the committee’s report caused the House to break out in a, rash of controversy. In original form the Government’s amending Bill did not represent legislative perfection, but it at least sought to improve t lie status and enhance the prospects of probationer nurses in approved private hospitals and also to remove the present invidious anomaly which allows the right of training for certificated status in public hospitals which, in some cases, are considerably smaller than several private hospitals, and probably are no better, if as good, in respect of healing service. The Health Minister’s proposal, as it was in the beginning, had the emphatic approval of the medical profession throughout the Dominion, although there were differences of opinion, as usual, as to detail. The proposed amendment to the principal Act, which restricts the training of nurses to public hospitals, was opposed without any qualification or spirit of compromise by the New Zealand Trained Nurses’ Association, which basesd its opposition on manifestly weak contentions that the Bill, if passed, would lower the status of £lie nursing profession, and would endanger, if not altogether lose, the existing reciprocity of admission between England anti New Zealand. Those arguments crumbled under the first assault by factual evidence and logic. The obdurate association overlooked the plain safeguard not only in the amending Bill, but in the existing law. There could he no deterioration in the nursing standard because the same authority that controls the training of nurses now and is responsible for the granting of certificated status would still exercise control. In other words student nurses, whether trained in approved private hospitals with fourteen, forty or four hundred beds, or trained in public hospitals with not enough beds here and there for patients needing attention, would have to pass the State examination for their qualifying certificates. As for the question of imperilled reciprocity England, or any other country with common sense in its policy toward other nations, would recognise the certificate and accept it as proof of ability, and give no heed to the size of the hospital in which training had been gained.

Now the Health Committee of the House of Representatives has approved the principle of private hospital training for probationer nurses, but it has hedged its approval with so many limitations and restrictions as to make the provision a doubtful concession, to say little about the difficulty in securing it. Originally the Bill stipulated that the average number of occtipied beds in a private hospital should be fifty. That proposal would have placed several private hospitals which might seek the right to train nurses for certificated status in a position, as regards accommodation, superior to no fewer than fifteen public hospitals which now function as training schools for probationers. The committee, in its oblique wisdom, has recommended that private hospitals desiring to be approved as training schools should make provision for at least forty public beds. It is difficult to understand the reason for this alteration. The time may come when private hospitals in New Zealand, as in several other countries. . will be able to make such provision, but it is impracticable at the moment. Few of our private hospitals deceive substantial voluntary contributions and endowments from private citizens. Beyond any doubt the amendments proposed by the Health Committee of the House of Representatives will defeat or at least diminish the commendable and reasonably fair purpose of the Minister of Health. Parliament should think twice, even in circumstances which permit neither work nor rest, before accepting the drastic alterations to the original Bill and, on second thoughts, reject them. VICTORY OVER THE SWAMPS IN the swamp lands of the Hauraki and Rangitaiki ( Plains a. great transformation has been wrought. Areas of land which but a decade or so ago appeared irreclaimable have been drained and brought under v cultivation. Some of this country has proved to be first-class dairying land, with a high productive yield and a promising futures and the work of creating it from fen and waste laud is still going on. Year by year, new tracts are being drained and offered for subdivision. In bare words the process appears to be prosaic. But in the pages of the annual reports, the latest of which has just been tabled in Parliament, is a record of daring constructive achievement, in which the resource, enterprise and perseverance of the drainage engineers have been-pitted against the forces of Nature, deflecting rivers from their courses, confining their channels, bringing restless streams under discipline, and checking tlie flow“of the tides. All these things have been done both on the Hauraki Plains and on the Rangitaiki Plains, near Whakatane, where the great outlay which the reclamation measures have entailed is offset by the high productive capacity of the lowlands now being farmed. In these drainage works, which have extended over .long periods of years, perseverance both on the part of the engineer and on the part of the farmer who follows him is ail essential quality. To a man who had seen the plains as they were twenty years ago, and who had not seen them in the interim, when the pools and silences of the impenetrable swamps were being gradually conquered, there would appear to have been some magic at work to effect this transformation. Yet the only magic is the magic of steady effort, of refusal to accept defeat, or to be discouraged by setbacks and reverses. The smiling pastures which deck the landscape of. the Hauraki Plains were not formed in a day. After the engineers came the farmers, with years of steady work ahead of them before their pastures were in satisfactory bearing. At times their farms are still subject to floods. There are still matters of detail to be attended to. A drain here, a floodgate there, seem to have a bearing on the problems affecting a man and his land. But, though to the settlers concerned the wheels of departmental processes at times seem to move with irritating slowness, over the general scheme improvements are still taking place. There is still land to be drained, but the. problems now are rather those of consolidation than of constructive effort. A line must be drawn between the farm lands and the flax country, and ponding areas must be maintained, to minimise the danger of flooding.. With Observance of due precautions, the land reclaimed from the great swamps of the Auckland Province will stand as a monument to administrative foresight and the courage of the settlers.