Dunedin Obstetrical Hospital

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21162, 12 May 1934, Page 12

Dunedin Obstetrical Hospital

It was to be hoped that in Offering £ 6000 towards the cost of the longplanned and necessary obstetrical hospital the Dunedin Savings Bank had given the Government the conclusive thrust to its duty; but the statement by the Minister for Health, printed in a special message to " The Press " this morning, is completely disappointing. It is not merely that Mr Young refuses; it is that he fastens on what is irrelevant and avoids the centre of the question, snatches at new excuses, and affects the tone of an injured party, as Ministers generally do when they are stubborn in the wrong. Mr Young makes much of it that the case which has been urged, chiefly by women's organisations, has been supported by some mis-statements. Most good cases are, if widely advocated; information has a way of loosening as it spreads. But the Minister makes no attempt to deny what is correctly stated—that the hospital was to complete the work of New Zealand's women in establishing and endowing the chair of obstetrics, and that a definite promise was made to construct it. Mr Young tangents off this difficulty with the hasty remark that "the present "Government" made no such promise. True; but the public will be astonished to hear it suggested—and the Government will be hard put to it to maintain —that the nonpolitical promises of one government may be disavowed by the next on so simple a plea. A straight-out grant was promised, and a straightout grant is due. Nor is Mr Young closer to being fair or closer to the point in his references to the conditions in which the medical students receive their obstetrical training. The question is not what they do or how much they do in other hospitals or what "new buildings or "other rewards" these other hospitals ask for, as the Minister sneeringly suggests; the question is, to what extent their training in Dunedin, directly under the chair, is diminished in value by the want of a modern hospital. The Minister ignores the question and the deplorable answer to it. As for the Government's alternative proposals, the first of them, the reconstruction of.St. Helens Hospital, is not worth discussing any further; in the second, so far as it seems to mean anything, the '■ Government offers to pay £IO,OOO at once and

£IO,OOO as subsidy on about £IO,OOO more which the Otago Hospital Board would have to raise to carry out the plan. But between this procedure and that which the board has stood for.there app&rs to be interposed only the sort of unworthy suspicion ( which wants to see the colour of an honest man's money. Otago has engaged to find it. The Dunedin Savings Bank offer—which extorts from the Minister no more gracious word of notice than that it has "nothing to do with the Gov- " ernment"—largely completes the engagement, with other sums in hand. Meanwhile, the obstetrical training given at Otago is less complete and efficient than it might be; and the cost of this failure —which the Government lengthens while it hesitates to pay £20,000 at once and be done with it —will be paid, year in and year out, by the mothers and children of the Dominion and in the end by the nation as a whole. The Government's delay leaves its money invested, with sure, abundant, cumulative returns, in sickness, pain, enfeeblement, and mortality; and it should end such extravagant folly at once.