One-stop-shop for medical assessments

Press, 2 December 1987, Page 35

One-stop-shop for medical assessments

PA Wellington Wellcare Hospital has opened a $2 million specialist medical centre which Wellcare’s general manager, John Rashleigh, describes as a “one-stop-shop” for medical assessments.

It will include occuptional health, cardiovascular, audiology and neurological assessment facilities as well as specialist consultation areas.

Mr Rashleigh said the centre’s opening was a further step toward meeting Wellcare’s objective of a fully integrated, multidisciplinary medical service on one site. A health surveillance and maintenance clinic would be set up in the centre early next year, as would a sports medicine unit to provide emergency and continuing treatment for sportsmen and women.

The centre is in the former Calvary Hospital convent building. Mr Rashleigh said he believed there was a market for such health care facilities and the centre had been modelled on similar overseas centres and adapted to New Zealand needs.

He believed the corporate market would be the largest market for such a facility because there was an increasing realisation by industry leaders that people were their biggest resource..

“When you think it costs 15 per cent of somebody’s salary to go to an agency to replace them because they have lost them through ill health we see them wanting to introduce some discipline to it and send employees (to the centre) on a contract basis,” he said.