MEDICAL SERVICES Association Criticises Delay In Inquiry

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30687, 1 March 1965, Page 14

MEDICAL SERVICES Association Criticises Delay In Inquiry

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, February 28. The New Zealand Medical Association, in a policy statement, criticises delays in determining the medical needs of the country.

It says that the Minister of Health (Mr McKay) and his Medical Advisory Committee are at present considering the recommendations of the Special Committee on Availability and Distribution of Medical Practitioners, which worked for four years, from 1959 to 1963, to prepare its report.

“These leisurely ways of determining medical needs are doing a great disservice to the country. The committee has needlessly dragged out over four years the comparatively simple investigations with which it was charged.

“This, together with further political delays, has been responsible for a gradual and costly deterioration in the efficiency of our medical services,” says the association.

The New Zealand Medical Association thinks such investigations should be conducted by methods more appropriate to the twentieth century. “We advocate the formation of a permanent and independent medical advisory council and the abandonment of the inefficient method of special committees. “In searching for information about the availability and distribution of doctors, the committee could have had at its disposal the opinions of 3000 experts on the working of practical medicine—the doctors of this country,” says the association. “In the four years in which it deliberated, the committee obtained the opinions of only 16 individual witnesses.” In spite of its wide terms of reference, the committee chose to leave the most important areas of maldistribution (house surgeons, mental hospitals, special areas) unconsidered, and made no attempt to correlate the needs of general practice with those of hospital medicine. “Incredible though it may seem in a report of this kind, there is, for example, no consideration at all of the number of hospital beds available and to the effect of this on the availability and distribution of medical practitioners. “This unbalanced approach makes many of the commit-

tee’s conclusions quite valueless, since general practice and hospital medicine are interdependent,” says the association.

“The A. and D. Committee recommended that general practitioners should claim the payment of the general medical service benefit on a new type of claim form which would enable the Health Department to see at a glance how often any individual patient had been seen by his doctor in a given time.

“The N.Z.M.A. opposes official interference between patients and their doctors. This recommendation would allow the Health Department to meddle with medical secrets and with professional judgment.

“It would be impossible to investigate suspected instances of over-treatment without forcing doctors and patients to divulge their private concerns,” say sthe association. “By discouraging general practitioners from giving full services, this proposal would drive an increasing number of

patients into hospitals and clinics. “The so-called •over-doctor-ing’ which the committee wishes to curb is one of the most promising and healthy features of New Zealand medicine, and one which saves the country a few million pounds a year.

“General practitioners in Auckland alone by their ‘overdoctoring’ save New Zealand £2,000,000 a year in hospital expenditure.”

The N.Z.M.A. commends the concept of a medical practice board under which all the money paid to schedule practitioners would be vested in a board, which would administer the funds and exercise operational control.

“The actual form which the recommendation takes is, however, quite unacceptable. It proposes a board which would run general practice without having any control over the hospitals.” The recommendation was also unacceptable because it would put the direction of general practice under the control of the British Medical Association.