"Elderly Folk Entitled To Nursing Care”

Press, Volume C, Issue 29487, 13 April 1961, Page 5

"Elderly Folk Entitled To Nursing Care”

(New Zealand Press' Association)

DUNEDIN, April 11. There was an increasing number of old folk who needed treatment of one kind or another, said the president of the New Zealand Hospital Boards’ Association (Mr W. E. Bate. Hastings) in his address at the seventeenth conference of hospital boards this morning. "We call them geriatric cases, but I am bound to say that is a designation I do not much like,” said Mr Bate. “They are simply senior citizens who. by reason of age, have come to the stage where they need, and are entitled to, some nursing care.”

“We are happily moving out of the era when folk who have mental ailments are more or less automatically relegated to the mental hospital.” said Mr Bate. "A vast number are entitled to be treated in their own home town and local hospital.” Increasing responsibility and mounting costs were the most prominent trend in hospital affairs, and as the administrators of tfte principal public agency in the promotion in health—the public hospital hospital boards must ask themselves how best to meet this challenge, Mr Bate said.