HOSPITAL NEED PARTLY MET

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 37, 13 February 1943, Page 4

HOSPITAL NEED PARTLY MET

THE words "gross overcrowding", have been so often used for so manyyears in relation to the Auckland Hospital that the prospect of an amelioration of the conditions will be welcomed by the whole community. The new Green Lane Hospital, with 264 beds, should relieve the main institution, and the board and its chairman, Mr. A. J. Moody, merit f congratulation on the near-completion of a building project which was undertaken and pushed on at a most difficult time. It had been hoped that long before now a beginning would have been made with the reconstruction of the institution now frequently described as "a conglomeration of buildings" in Park Road. Six years have passed since a scheme of major reconstruction was submitted, and more than four years since the present board decided to make a beginning with it. Then uncertainty concerning the scope of the Social Security Act, high building costs, and the imminent threat of war combined to challenge the wisdom of the decision, and,, not for the first time, action was deferred. These circumstances are recalled not to depreciate the importance of the addition to the city's hospital facilities which was opened by the Prime Minister to-day, but to emphasise that the major problem remains. There appears little prospect that a beginning will be made to solve it while the war lasts, but the rebuilding of the main institution should certainly be near the top of the list of construction projects when the war ends.