HOME-CARE SERVICES

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29956, 18 October 1962, Page 19

HOME-CARE SERVICES

Minister Wants Extension : There were greater opportunities today to treat sick people in their own homes instead of in hospitals, said the Minister of Health (Mr McKay) in an address to the annual conference of the New Zealand Hospital Officers’ Association in Christchurch yesterday. The Department of Health was already developing such services as widely as possible throughout New Zealand. “I believe they are needed, and that those already in existence are proving their undoubted worth,” Mr McKay said. Some hospital boards were doing very good work in providing home-care services—nine boards were running them, and two other boards planning to do so—but a lot more work was still required, he said. The “key man” in extramural care of patients was the general practitioner, and it was up to boards to give him the facilities to enable him to give treatment to people in their own homes. Home-care Statistics

Quoting statistics from one hospital board, Mr McKay said the number of people receiving home-care services would fill a 32-bed hospital ward all the year round. In the first year of their operations 53.198 visits to homes were made by the district nursing service, compared with 41,424 the previous year, and from April 1 to August 30 this year, 23,435 visits compared with 21.000 in the same period in 1961. The same board’s meals-on-wheels service had extended 'from 35 a day to 340. “These domiciliary services have proved an unqualified success in areas where they are operating,” Mr McKay said. “A lot more will be heard in the future about them.”

Mr McKay also thanked conference delegates for their services in the hospital field- “ This is now very big business indeed, and I appreciate the contribution delegates are making,” he said. The Minister was ' thanked for his address by the association's president, Mr A. F. Wilton (Wellington), who said that delegates from boards not yet operating domiciliary services had been given much food for thought.

The conference was also addressed by Mr W. E. Bate, president of the Hospital Boards' Association of New Zealand.