Amalgamation Of Hospital Boards

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30738, 30 April 1965, Page 10

Amalgamation Of Hospital Boards

The merging of the West Coast hospital boards, suggested by the Minister of Health (Mr McKay), is overdue. It is to be hoped that the people of the West Coast will not allow it to be further delayed by parochialism. The continued existence of four hospital boards on the W’est Coast will benefit noone—certainly not New Zealand taxpayers as a whole, for they must pay for four parallel administrations where one would do; and certainly not the people of the West Coast, who must understand that some attenuation of hospital services is inevitable when four boards are each trying to provide a complete service with inadequate resources.

Improved transport, which has brought all the main West Coast towns within a couple of hours’ easy travel of Greymouth—the logical centre for hospital consolidation —has turned much of the West Coast’s medical structure into an anachronism. The other towns still need a few hospital beds for uncomplicated maternity cases; they need beds for longterm patients, mostly geriatric cases, requiring little beyond nursing care and physical therapies; they need a few casualty beds; they need old people’s homes. But acute cases, and any needing specialist treatment, would be best dealt with in a central hospital. Christchurch should continue to provide some of the smaller medical “ specialties ”, Outpatient clinics could be held in both the central hospital and in the smaller towns.

An amalgamation very similar to that now proposed for the West Coast was carried out a few years ago in Mr McKay’s own district of Northland; and it has given general satisfaction. Another amalgamation of four boards is being discussed in Taranaki. These are not, however, the only places where small boards might consider the wider public interest. One is Ashburton, where lately the difficulties of trying to maintain a full medical service in a small town have shown themselves all too clearly.