'Hospital Boards Weak'

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30769, 5 June 1965, Page 25

'Hospital Boards Weak'

TN 7. Press Association) PALMERSTON NORTH. June 4. Hospital boards lack spirit, and it is the patients who suft'er in the end. according to the “New Zealand Medical Journal” in an editorial. It cites the case of the meal payments by junior I medical staff. “Why did so many hospital j boards accept this stupid and ignorant direction (from the Health Department) with feeble protest or even without demur?" asks the editorial. . In bygone years, when salaries were “no more than token rewards,” a board was almost “in loco parentis” to, its house surgeons and the relationship between the two was indefinably different from that between board and senior

medical staff, better orienta-' ted to fight their own battles. “How some chairman of a former decade would have roared in rage at such an impertinent intrusion into their; domestic affairs." says the edi- 1 tonal. It sees this as evidence of widespread weakness among! hospital boards. The editorial refers to the views of a senior administrator back after an overseas hospital tour, who is said to be ■ convinced the same thing is happening in Britain. “Hospitals.” he says, “large and small, if allowed to retain their identity and independence. also retain an individual price in efficiency and ' in service rendered. “How true.” says the editorial. It retains doubts about the ; abandonment of local rating I for hospitals, with its attendjant transfer of authority to the source of finance—the. State. In the process the pati-1

ents have lost something too. “It is they who suffer in the end." The editorial says doctors in New Zealand have yet to be convinced that the proper balance of local and centralised authority in the hospital service has been achieved. “Surely it is fundamental that central policy be designed to attract hospital person-: nel, not drive them away. At! the moment this is scarcely being done.”