Doctors’ fees too high for some patients

Press, 12 April 1984, Page 9

Doctors’ fees too high for some patients

Some patients seeking treatment at Christchurch Hospital have admitted that they came to the accident and emergency department because they could not pay a doctor’s fees.

The hospital’s medical superintendent, Dr David Andrews, said it was a new phenomenon.

“In the last few weeks patients have been making specific mention that they are there because they could not afford to go to their general practitioners,” he told a Canterbury Hospital Board committee yesterday. The number involved was only a handful of cases but it was unusual. Increased doctors’ fees in the wake of the Government

price freeze could be a contributing factor, Dr Andrews said later. He told the board’s health services committee that accident and emergency department staff had seen about 1650 more cases last year than the previous year. “The problems really are the minor illnesses and also the very minor accidents, a cut that needs one or two stitches,” he said.

About 80 per cent of such patients had not tried to see their own doctor first. Return visits were discouraged, to the extent that the hospital’s accident and emergency department had one of the lowest rates of treating second-time patients in New Zealand.