St. Helens Hospital.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19940, 29 May 1930, Page 10

St. Helens Hospital.

Most people will be glad that so strong a protest was made to the Hospital Board yesterday against the proposal to rebuild St. Helens Hospital on a site near the Essex Home. The Essex Home is necessary, humane, efficient, and in a sad .way a credit to the community; but it should not be associated in any way at all with St. Helens Hospital. It will indeed astonish most people that it was ever proposed by the Health Department or by the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board that the two should be associated to the extent even of being placed on or near the same plot of land, since one is a rescue home and the other a hospital established and maintained for the benefit of married women who cannot afford to spend twenty, thirty, or forty pounds every time a baby is born. It is true that St. Helens is not under existing conditions efficient. It can never be made efficient until it is rebuilt and enlarged, but the Government purchased a suitable site for this purpose many years ago, and it was an almost inexplicable blunder to suggest abandoning that site and rebuilding beside the Essex Home in Linwood. It is not necessary to consider at present whether what was intended was not only adjacency of sites but unity of control, or to ask why the Hospital Board, which is embarrassed already by the control of so many unprofitable institutions, should have been anxious to burden itself with another. The Minister for Health will be in Christchurch on Saturday, and there can be no doubt that the representations which will then be made to him will end this astonishing proposal for ever.