Country Hospitals

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31341, 11 April 1967, Page 16

Country Hospitals

Sir, —Is there a kind of crazy thinking behind the movement to close country hospitals? Is a country population no longer a necessary ingredient to the maintenance and indeed the improvement of primary production or is primary production no longer

of importance in our economy? Is the closing of country hospitals aimed at giving greater impetus to the drift of country population to the cities or is it that the country is so oversupplied with doctors that they bend over backwards to accept country practice regardless of the usual incentive—a hospital? Of course we must be economical and we must have government departments filled with expert staff and computers to convince us that stattistics are more important than health; otherwise we might get around to such retrograde conclusions as that the closing of a few government departments might help the economy. No, sir, close the hospitals; that’s the responsible thing to do.— Yours, etc.

C.A.R.T. (Campaign Against Retrograde Thinking). April 10, 1967.