Accidents are way to fast treatment

Press, 25 January 1988, Page 8

Accidents are way to fast treatment

Family Doctor

"It just doesn’t make sense to me,” John B. told me in the surgery the other day. I don’t actualy call him John (though I think of him as that) because he is 70 and was in the war. I call him Mr B. What didn’t make sense to him was the amount of time his wife has been waiting for a hip replacement operation. Two years she has been on the waiting list, and in that time she has become progressively more crippled with arthritis until now she is housebound, walking painfully with sticks.

She is unable to take much in the way of pain relief because she has a stomach ulcer that flares

up whenever she takes anti-inflammatory drugs. The hospital says she is eleventh on the list, and that it will be another couple of months before she can have the operation. Meantime her other hip is beginning to hurt.

What doesn’t make sense to him is that if she were a drunken larrikin who wiped out his motorbike against a lamp-post on a Saturday night she would be admitted at once, treated with speed, paid 75 per cent of her weekly wage by a grateful Accident Compensation Corporation, and given a lump sum for any residual disability. And what really riles him is that when his own grandson (who has a leg paralysed from birth, and who needs admission to hospital from time to time for operations to the leg) goes into the hospital, he

is paid a derisory amount in Sickness Benefit, and loses his job. It doesn’t seem terribly fair to him.

I must say it worries me a little too. What is so holy about accidents that we allow this curious inequity to exist in New Zealand?

Why does a person who, through no fault of their own become sick, have to pay more in doctors’ fees and waiting time, and receive less in weekly compensation, and nothing in lump sum settlement, than an accident victim? Why, if you cut your little finger, can you receive free treatment at the local hospital, when, if you get a sore throat, you have to go and see your own doctor, and pay the usual fee? Why is it, that if your

back just gets sore, you have to pay the doctor and the physiotherapist, but if you strain it lifting a beer keg you are entitled to heavily subsidised treatment? Is it some primitive philosophical attitude that insists that sickness is a punishment for sin, that somehow victims of illness should be blamed, and those of accidents rewarded? Or is it just an inequitable health system that has been allowed to arise, uncontrolled and unco-ordinated, piecemeal and fractured, over the years? The latter, to give our health planners the benefit of the doubt: laissezfaire rather than malign intent. But it is high time for reform of the whole system, so that illness and accident are treated with the same urgency and compensation, so that family doctor and' hospital services are equally accessible to those in need, for whatever cause. Review is under way: review of primary care and hospitals. It is urgently needed.