OUR HOSPITALS.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18677, 28 April 1926, Page 8

OUR HOSPITALS.

SYSTEM. OF CONTROL. bj&a.>s rejoinder to MINISTER, (IUM AOBOCUIXO* TXIJKJBJLX.) WELLINGTON, April 37. Dr. H. E. Gibbe, chairman of the Council of the New Zealand branch of the British Medical Association, made the following reply to the remarks cf the Hon. J. A. ioung, Minister for Health, at Huntly:— "The executive of the B.M.A. read with regret and some degree of resents meat the statements of tne Minister for iiealth at Muutly as reported in the Press. When we—the Health Department, the Hospital Boards, and the B.M.A. —are all working together for the betterment and improved service of our hospitals it is hardly fair or generous, or it is as a schoolboy would put it, 'not playing cricket,' lor the Minister of all people to attribute purely selfish and interested motives to one of the partieß. "The Minister'B remarks that the control of hospitals would remain with the people, ahd that it would be a serious mistake if such control were to pass into the hands of the medical profession, assumes that sucn a conuition was the aim and object of doctors. or would be welcomed bv them,

bUIS) ui WUUIU ue WtJiUUUifll uy UICIU, ! whereas we again emphatically assert that neither individually nor collectively do doctors desire to control hospitals or their policy. Doctors do feel that by reason of their intimate relationships with these institutions they should know something about them, and that their opinions should therefore carry some weight and respect. Thev know that, good as our hospitals are, they could be made better, could be made to serve a wider public, could be run more economically, and could oe made of greater educational value and service to the medical profession, t'rom which the public would receive most benefit. Knowing this, should not the medical profession speak outP And if it does, should it not expect' the Minister for Health, of all people, to listen sympathetically to the views expressed, instead of excusing and accounting for the Taihoa policy, and the smug complacency that all in the hospital garden is lovely, by insinuating that the interest of the doctors arid the B.M.A. is wholly selfish and I with the ulterior object of getting control of the hospitals? ! "So far is this from being the case that, were it at all possible or probable, the B.M.A and the doctors would shrink from the responsibility. It is not desired to traverse the report of the speech in detail—the covert belittling of the American authority because it is American, the drawing of the red herring of appalling fees across the pathj when we ail know that all charges in America are appalling to our standards, the ambiguous use of. the term 'community' as applied to the hospitals. "But one might point out that the Minister's reference to British hospitals was particularly unfortunate for his argument, as these hospitals are run just as it is advocated that ours should be run—free from political influence and control, with selected boards rather than elected, and with income (from voluntary subscriptions) controlling expenditure, and noi, as, with us, with estimates, arid therefore expenditure, mounting up year by year, with no finality in sight."