$98,000 less for health projects

Press, 19 June 1979, Page 6

$98,000 less for health projects

Health reporter

Six community health projects in and around Christchurch will have $98,000 less to spend this year. This is because of reductions of up to 30 per cent in community health spending, in which some staff might lose their jobs, and services to the elderly, disabled, and terminally ill will ’be reduced. The worst hit will be the tincoln Community Care :heme (30 per cent cut) and the Co-ordinating Office for Community Support and Geriatric Services (18.5 per cent). The other services to have their spending cut are Community Child and Family Guidance Service, 12 per cent; the Primary Health Care Unit, 7 per cent; the Christchurch Diabetes Centre, 16 per cent; and the Alcoholic Assessment Centre, 7 per cent. All the projects affected were set up to keep persons out of hospitals and institutions and in the community.

The reduced funds to the Co-ordinating Office for Support and Geriatric Services prevents growth and means that services will have to be reduced to match the demands of the cuts.

The services co-ordinator, (Mr P. W. Andrew) said last evening that he found the cuts hard to believe. Plans for the service had been well researched and were designed to meet a strong demand already evident in the community.

“Now we get this bombshell. I am sure that some common sense win emerge so that this disastrous position can be changed as quickly as it was forced on us.” Mr Andrew said the 18.5 per cent cut — $41,000 —

would mean that some of his staff would lose their jobs. The same situation faces the Lincoln Community Care scheme which might have to reduce its home-aid services by 55 per cent to meet the demands of its $15,169 cut. The Care scheme’s board held an emergency meeting yesterday morning to discuss the effects of the cut on the service which has only been running for three months. Its chairman (Dr Gerald Irwin) said after the meeting that the pattern of demand for the community services was only beginning to emerge. “It is already obvious that we are keeping many of our local people out of hospitals and institutions where they would have been forced to go with the previous level of help.”

Dr Irwin said that the cuts would put the communitycare scheme into the position of “having to wait until people die before we can extend the services.”

A meeting of the institutions committee of the North Canterbury Hospital Board yesterday morning reacted angrily to the cost-paring announcement, relayed to the board in a letter from the Health Department. It decided that urgent action must be taken to have the reasons for the cuts examined and reviewed. The board will send a deputation of senior officers to hold a “face to face” discussion with Government and officers in the department. The board’s chairman (Mr T. C. Grigg) said that the Government and the World Health Organisation strongly supported the principles of community health. More than S27M had been set aside for community projects and he was “very concerned” about the effects of the cuts.

Dr Margaret Guthrie, the

chairman of the board’s social services committee, said that the cuts did not equate with the emphasis on community involvement and preventive health from the Minister of Health (Mr Gair) and his predecessor (Mr Gill) or from the department. The cuts were much harsher than the 1 per cent cuts in hospital services announced in March, she said. The arbitrary nature of the proposed cuts, especially in wages and salaries was bad enough. But nothing had been said as to how salaries and wages were to be cut, Dr Guthrie said. The effect of staff dismissals could force the terminally ill back into the hospitals because the night-sitter service was threatened. “This new service has been an instant success in allowing hard-pressed relatives of elderly and infirm or terminally ill cancer patients to have a night’s sleep knowing their relative is being watched over,” she said. The scheme allowed for a better quality of home care and also freed hard-pressed beds 'in hospitals.

Financial allocations listed for the six big projects would “cripple” what was already proving to be effective and efficient services, Dr Guthrie said.