The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1918 A HOSPITAL SCANDAL.

Taihape Daily Times, 20 December 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1918 A HOSPITAL SCANDAL.

(With which is incorporated The faihape Po«l tad Wale»rl'iO Newel.

The miserable farce of compelling a

growingly large and important district like Taihape to take its hospital management from Wanganui is being played to a scandalous, heartless, inhuman and disastrous end. The epi-

demic just dying out has so clearly defined the hospital territory that should be administered from Taihape as to leave little doubt in the mind of any body but those who have kinks in their intelligence and are not capable of reasoning from fact to fact and from cause to effect. This jour-

nal from beginning to end of the awful visitation of plague endeavoured to unearth something to chronicle with reference to what the Wanganui Hospital Authorities were doing in this part of its territory to help in stemming the appalling wave of death that was passing over it, but its efforts were in vain. We were desirous of putting our previously stated views to the test, for more than once or twice in this column we had stated that, from a long experience of local government in this colony, it was not economically possible to have effective hospital government at such a distance. We say economically possible because we realised that it could only be accomplished by the setting up of a local board with full powers, finan-

cially and otherwise to humanely fulfil the purposes for which hospitals are established and intended. Having come to this conclusion the' utter absurdity of remaining glued to a foreign body at Wanganui became evident, for if Taihapc could not be managed from a centre so far distant what wias to be expected would be the ease with Ohakune and still further north? All that could be learned

from the Wanganui Board Officers during the epidemic was that lt(hey had more work in Wanganui than they could attend to. As a matter of fact we have fully realised that the Board has, in all normal times, more ■work thian it can or does, intelligently and effectually cope with, and we have, in the interests of human life said so. The correctness of our expressed views have now been undeniably substantiated; our hospital system has been proved ia. failure; to say it has broken down would be wrong, for it was nothing more than a foundationless, tottering structure at best; it has been a hospital in little more than name. There arc misguided people who imagine they get a good article because they pay a lot of money for it, and It here may be Taihape people who were under the impression that because they had the

| spur of a hill overlooking the town | ornamented with a hospital building, ! that the bone-setting and physicing

requirements of the district were quite up to date, but inquire and search where one will there arc the trails of inefficiency. If patients have stood the ordeal of a fifty or sixty

miles train or ear, journey they arrive to risk losing their lives by the shortcomings and remissnesses of an incapable management. We say, in all seriousness that a shameful state of affairs, of neglect and incapacity, has been current to a culpable and inhuman degree during the epidemic, for we realise that there is a vast difference between a shortage through stress and nothing at all. Had it not been for the splendid work done by Mr. Arrowsmith and his Committee, the very thought of what would have happened is indeed (awesome. W|e have numbers of homes from which parents have been taken from children and children from parents, but without Mayor’s efforts one -can only th/ak and shudder at what might have been. While hospital wards built expressly for infectious diseases were not used, or allowed to be used, Mr Arrowsmith found, and commandeered large church buildings admirably suited for life-saving under such circumstances, and within a few hours those buildings were equipped with beds, patients lying around, brought in by a perfect motor service while willing nurses got the beds in readiness. Whatever good service Mr Arrowsmith may have rendered this town in the past, it is assured 'that he will ever be remembered for the untiring, practical institution and management of the hospital establishment that should have been the unsbiftable duty of the Wanganui Hospital Board to found iand furnish. While nothing but praise and thanks can be uttered in connection with the

people’s temporary hospitals, let the* nurses and others proclaim the shortcomings, and shortcommons, at the public institution. In a letter to the Hospital Board, read at the meeting on Wednesday Nurse M. M. Reid, who acted as . night nurse at the Taihape Hospital, wrote saying:— j “Up to the present I have been ! obliged ito provide mysdlf 'wfth, various articles of food, owing to the fact that the hospital fare is shockingly inadequate. I do not know if you arc aware of the condition of things, but I unhesitatingly say that this institution is a disgrace to the community. Prom observations I made, patients on liquid diet received only milk and water; coifee and cocoa were made with water, and soup—the most essential thing—were somthing unheard of.” Mr. A. L. Arrowsmith, Mayor of Taihape, wrote stating that: “Taihape dealt with patients from as far north as Karioi, and as far south as Ohingaiti. The public hospital was scandalously understaffed, and the epidemic war useless for the want of a staff and beds.” Finally he added: “Our representative on the Board was continuously absent from Taihape from the start of the trouble,” j

For the 'present coanmcnf. xm the two letters is withheld, but the time has now arrived when steps must be taken to ring down the curtain on the hospital farce that is developing into a ? scandal of such magnitude and seriousness that no resident in this densely settled huge territory can, from ia. humane aspect alone, in all decency no longer neglect.