No request yet made for health centre

Taupo Times, Volume 23, Issue 48, 18 June 1974, Page 3

No request yet made for health centre

a health centre has not been established in Taupo because the hospital board has received no request from local doctors for the facility, says Mr J. W. Birnie, the Taupo member on the Waikato Hospital Board. He was replying to the questions raised by "Mother of Four" in her letter to the editor on May .23. "The Health Department, from which all hospital boards statutorily take their instructions, has laid down that the initiative for the development of any scheme to establish a health centre in New Zealand should in the first instance come from interested doctors in the area to be servecl," he said. "This would seem logical as it would not be practical to establish a health centre if there were no doctors in the district willing to ruri one.'4 The Waikato Hospital Board is in the process of establishing a centre at Tokoroa at the request of a

number of medical practitioners in the town. "If any group of doctors wished to come to Taupo and set up a health centre here. the board statutorily would have to give consideration to the establishment of such a unit," said Mr Birnie. Government grants, separate from normal building loans. are now available to hospital boards to buy land and erect the units. "This means that there is no drain on the usual hospital board finances," said Mr Birnie. "The space taken by each private doctor or other occupant is rented to them by the board at a rate laid down by the Health Departnient." Doctors. dentists and other personnel using the • centre would be completely independent. "Their freedom of practice and the right of the patient to have free choice of his doctor and access to this doctor, are to be preserved," he said.