Health centre need ‘urgent’

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34105, 18 March 1976, Page 16

Health centre need ‘urgent’

Health centres are urgently needed in the health service, and their planning should not be held up by r a Government committee reviewing health policies, Professor D. W. Beaven told a North Canterbury Hospital Board finance committee meeting yesterday.

Professor Beaven was commenting on a letter from the Department of Health advising the board that an advisory committee had been set up to review health centre policies. No indication was given when the committee would meet or when its recommendations would be available.

The department said that action on health centres would be reduced to a minimum, until the committee reported. "This is of grave concern to the board,” said Professor Beaven.

A committee had been set up without a deadline, and had placed a total embargo on an urgent facility, which was a retrograde step, he said.

“It will be a crazy philosophy if there is a rubber stamp for all health centres in New Zealand. Forward-looking

doctors in Christchurch are already looking to setting up their own concept of health centres, and a local philosophy will evolve,” said Professor Beaven.

However, Mr W. L. F. Utley felt that a lot more ground work on the health centre concept was needed, and that the committee could help in this. Questions such as who would staff the centres when they opened, and how they would be planned, needed to be explained. “When it comes to the actual planning it is very difficult to know how a centre is going to work,” said Mr Utley.

Sketch clans cannot proceed on the Hornby health centre because of the directive. In the case of Lyttelton and Hornby, action would be restricted to what the board had already been committed to.

The medical superintend-ent-in-chief (Dr L. McH. Berry) said that to complete existing health centres would cost about s3m to s4m. He told the meeting that the committee should accept what the committee was trying to do. “The country is in a state of economic crisis, and cannot sustain the activitv in the health centre field that is being generated,” said Dr Berry.