HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 26985, 10 March 1953, Page 10

HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

COMMITTEE REPORTS ON NEEDS GOVERNMENT URGED TO BUILD HOMES (New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, March 9. New Zealand mental hospitals are seriously overcrowded and understaffed. and lack the equipment and the supervision necessary to keep defective children diversely occupied. This is one of the comments made by the special consultative committee which was set up last year <0 investigate the needs of intellectually handicapped children. The committee’s report -has just been finished and presented to the Minister of Education (Mr R. M. Algie). its main recommendation is that the Government should provide good residential institutions for the majority of intellectually handicapped children and adults in the community.

The .committee reported that present mental hospitals were not the best places for mentally defective children, mainly because there was no opportunity to segregate them properly from the adult patients. “Indeed, the mental hospitals accept children of the imbecile group only, as it were under pressure, when there is nowhere else for them to go,” said the committee. In the mental deficiency institutions conditions were very much better, however, and were being improved. The only satisfactory policy was to provide good residential institutions under the Mental Hygiene Division of the Health Department, but independent of mental hospitals. For the child from five onward the committee cor.sidered more would be’ done through institutions to liberate the parents and to develop the powers of activity arid enjoyment in the children than could be achieved any other way. Some of the drawbacks of the scheme listed by the committee were that no staff, however wisely .chosen, could give the child just the same love and care as that of a good parent; and residential institutions were costly. The capital cost of a new or extended institution was roughly estimated at £l5OO a child. The committee considered that any new institutions should accommodate about 400 or 500 in separate residential units taking about 30 each. The estimated number of lowergrade mental defectives in the country, both children and adults, was given as about 4000.

The committee’s report will be thoroughly discussed at the annual meeting in Wellington later this month of the New Zealand Intellectually Handicapped Children’s Parents’ Association, the body which asked for the investigation.