A COMMUNITY HOSPITAL.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19156, 12 November 1927, Page 6

A COMMUNITY HOSPITAL.

♦ . ~ SYDNEY SCHEME. QUESTION OP MATERNITY WARDS.

(nunc our own cobbbspondmt.) SYDNEY, November- 3. The sense of civic pride which animates, in a very practical form, the residents of some of the better-class suburbs of Sydney, and which is reflected in the beautification of streets by the householders themselves, has now found expression in a new and very humane and useful form. SydneyV public hospitals are crowded. Most of them are in a bit of a plight, financially. With debts and overdrafts which are oppressing them like an incubus, they find it impossible to make extensions to meet the ever-growing needs of a vast metropolis. The residents of the North Shore have now faced courageously the hospital problem as it affects them, with the lead of the very active community service club in one of the suburbs across the water. They have established, in a magnificent remodelled private residence, a big community hospital, which, while being self-support-ing and not conducted for profit, will be independent of charitable aid. The hospital will offer, at reasonable rates, the advantages of a private hospital to residents of the North Shore desirous of retaining the attention and treatment of their own medical advisers. The building itself is the gift of the beneficiaries of a local doctor. Another aspect of the pressing hospital problem in New South Wales is the question whether accommodation for women, in the travail of motherhood, should take the form of maternity wards attached to hospitals, or of special maternitv hospitals or homes. The womenfolk, especially those in the country, have been openly advised by one of Sydney's leading medical men, who can speaV his mind since he has retired from active work, to reject as an insult to their sex any proposal to establish maternity wards attached to hosnitals. This is on a very logical ground that child-bearing is neither a disease nor a casualty, but a natural function of healthy womanhood, and should not, either for private or health reasons, be associated in any form with hospitals, whose functions ara the treatment of diseases and accidents and treneral infections. He watnen are plainly told to reject any such proposal as a barbarism.