SCLEROSIS CENTRE

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 9

SCLEROSIS CENTRE

Street Appeal On Friday

The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canterbury will hold a street appeal on Friday for its new welfare centre to be built in St. Asaph street. The section for the centre was bought with help from the Canterbury University Students’ Association and the Golden Kiwi grants committee. The money available will cover also part of the cost of the building, but the society hopes that the street day will bring in £6OOO or more and so enable the whole project to be opened debtfree and furnished with needed comfort for patients. The centre will be a meeting-place not only for sclerosis sufferers but for all the physically disabled. The aim is to provide them with care, attention, and companionship, such as they cannot usually get away from their own homes.

The Canterbury society is one of four in New Zealand which exist to help the estimated 2000 to 3000 sufferers from the disease. Among the society’s projects for this year has been to pay the expenses of three physiotherapists to Sydney to attend a course being run there by Miss M. Knott, an American expert in rehabilitation therapy. Miss Knott’s methods are taught to students at the New Zealand School of Physiotherapy in Dunedin. When Miss R. Draper, a staff pnysiotherapist of the Christchurch Hospital, was sent overseas in 1963 to study the treatment of neuromuscular disorders, among the techniques she learnt were some used by Miss Knott. Miss Draper will conduct three post-graduate courses at the hospital this year for New Zealand physiotherapists.