Clark seeks hospital closing assurance

Press, 29 August 1989, Page 8

Clark seeks hospital closing assurance

PA Wellington The Wellington Area Health Board will have to assure the Minister of Health, Ms Clark, that it can maintain adequate mental health care before being allowed to close Porirua Hospital, she said yesterday. The board is considering shutting the psychiatric hospital, a move expected to save $15.3 million. Ms Clark said it was “absolutely essential” that board

had a proper mental health service development plan.

“In the advice that I’ve had from the Department of Health it’s been indicated that the board needs to do some work on its mental health services,” she said. She had extensive powers to intervene under the area health board legislation but had said consistently that she should not do so in an ad hoc way.

In the cases of Wellington and Christchurch, she had hafl the

department monitoring the boards’ progress and bringing their budgets into line with their Government allocations. The Wellington board’s problem was that no option looked "anything like saving as much money as the Porirua one.” The member of Parliament for Pencarrow, Ms Sonja Davies, said a board team should a review options which increased efficiency and cut costs without “throwing highly trained and dedicated health workers and,*.

increasingly, the institutions they help to maintain on the scrapheap.’’ The World Federation for Mental Health has condemned the proposed closing of Porirua Hospital. The federation supported the Mental Health Foundation in calling for the decision to be deferred until the area health board had finished considering all available options and community care plans were well developed.