FLAGRANT UNTRUTHS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1945, Page 6

FLAGRANT UNTRUTHS

N.Z. MEDICAL SERVICE AUSTRALIAN CRITICISM P.A. DUNEDIN, this day. Comment on the Australian criticism of New Zealand's general practitioner medical service was made last night by Dr. D. G. McMillan, chairman of the Otago Hospital Board. "The doctors in Australia, he said, "are preparing to oppose the introduction of social security benefits in that country, and, just as some New Zealand doctors in opposing the introduction of social security benefits in New Zealand shamefully maligned health insurance and the medical profession in Great Britain, so, too, their counterparts and their political assistants in Australia have commenced a campaign of calumny against the health services and medical profession in New Zealand. The medical profession, no doubt, is well able to defend its own ethics, but when such flagrantly untruthful statements are made about our hospital system it is time that, as loyal New Zealanders, we called a halt and objected to our good name and national reputation being sullied by being turned into an Australian political football." As members were''aware, Dr. McMillan concluded, the out-patient system in Dunedm was largely on an appointment basis. To say that patients were kept waiting was an untruth, and he could say that when the board's new out-patients' department was oompleted it would be the equal of anything in the world.