Threat of funds cut to Family Planning

Press, 10 June 1982, Page 2

Threat of funds cut to Family Planning

PA Wellington The Government yesterday indicated that familyplanning groups could have funds cut as part of the redistribution of healthspending money. The Minister of Health (Mr Malcolm) said that he was looking at family-planning money as part of the Government's review of health spending. Mr Malcolm has said on several occasions that health spending has increased 93 per cent in the last 20 years and he is committed to stopping that growth. The Government policy is to keep health spending constant by reallocating money from secondary services to primary health care, and redistributing money between hospital boards. Subsidies on water supply and sewerage have already been reduced, and a review of community health projects is under way. Mr Malcolm said family planning was one

of these. “I am now examining in depth, the way in which we are spending more than $2 million a year on supporting various family planning movements." he told the Waikato Post-graduate Medical Society. He said that he was making and would continue to make "sincere efforts” to "identify resources which could be reallocated towards the primary health sector.” The Family Planning Association handles 130,000 patients a year and offers its services through 42 clinics. Dr Olga Batt, president of the association, said the services fulfilled a need not met by other primary health care services. Family Planning offered a range of services not readily available in busy general practice. Family-planning doctors had more time to spend with their patients and patients were assured of confidentiality.

Dr Batt said figures supplied to the Health Department showed that the service. in effect, paid for itself if 16 pregnancies a year were prevented. “The savings made from not paying out domestic purpose and family benefits for the first 15 years of 16 children’s lives is equal to the family-planning grant," she said. The chairman of Labour's caucus committee on health. Dr M. E. Bassett, accused Mr Malcolm of "gratuitous attacks” on the Family Planning Association. The association did valuable work which many general practitioners did not want to handle for a variety of personal, religious, and medical reasons, he said. The Government’s stance contained inherent criticism of the "tens of thousands of people who had preferred the family-planning centres and who believed they have had good advice from them."