Hospital Board has 400 empty hostel rooms

Press, 22 July 1980, Page 1

Hospital Board has 400 empty hostel rooms

Health reporter

About 400 rooms are empty in Christchurch hospitals but none are likely to be used by patients.

Most of the empty rooms, which represent a multi-million dollar investment by the North Canterbury Hospital Board over more than 30 years, are in nurses’ hostels at the Princess Margaret Hospital and Christchurch Hospital,.

The trend for. nurses to live away from the hos-’ pitals in which they work has caused the embarrassing surplus of rooms scattered through 14 nurses’ hostels in Christchurch, Once nurses were forced to live in for their training but these rules have been relaxed.

The board provides 936 rooms for nurses in hostels. Only 329 of these-are used by nurses while other board staff occupy 96 of the rooms. About 100 rooms

are used as changing rooms for nurses between duties. This leaves a total of 407 rooms not used for residential accommodation. A few of these are used for office space but most lie idle.

Plans to erect new buildings at an estimated cost of more than $25 million at Christchurch Hospital over the next 15 years are not able' to take account of the large ' amount of empty space in the nearby nurses’ hostel because of the high cost of adapting these for clinical use. However, a committee is considering how to make use of the empty rooms for non-clinical purposes. This process is hampered because no Government finance is available for altering existing residential buildings. An alternative use'for the empty rooms may be to provjde accommodation for the relatives of patients at hospitals in the city. The

South Island’s ■ first bodyscanning service may also be able to use some of the rooms for “walking” patients.

Security • has been a major problem at the larger hostels making non-resi-dential use of the-buildings difficult. After attacks on nurses near the main nurses’ hostel at Christchurch Hospital, the Hoss pital Board employed a private security firm to ensure the safety of the nursing staff. Any large-scale nonresidential. use of the hostel buildings would complicate these security arrangements. Hospital Board officers are surprised that more nurses do not use the residential accommodation. This is cheap by most standards, with a top rate for full board of $2l a week.

Students at most of the University of Canterbury hostels pay more than $4O a week for full board.

One Hospital Board officer said yesterday that it obviously needed more than cheap, subsidised board to attract a lot of nurses back into the hostels.

“They are a millstone round the board’s neck and there seems little at present we can do to put them to more economic use,” the officer said.