Call for Govt to prevent closings

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 8

Call for Govt to prevent closings

By

DEBORAH McPHERSON

The Government has been called on to prevent the closing of the Christchurch public hospitals for the elderly, Coronation and Jubilee.

More than 160 people who gathered yesterday at two protest meetings unanimously agreed to demand that the Government help the Canterbury Area Health Board out of its financial squeeze, so it can postpone the closings.

The board wants to close Coronation and Jubilee as part of its efforts to trim $3O million from its budget by next June.

It has decided to close both hospitals in six months and transfer the elderly to general and private hospitals. It intends to eventually sell the hospitals. The meetings want the closings delayed until patients and staff can be relocated as complete units in new buildings close to public transport.

They urged that members elected to the board next month be more compassionate and reverse the decision.

The money expected to be saved by closing the hospitals was not

enough justification for disrupting the lives of so many aged and infirm people, said the meetings’ organiser, Mr Les Burgess. Mr Burgess, aged 86, has been a lay preacher for 58 years at the 100-year-old Jubilee Hospital in Woolston.

He said he was trilled at yesterday’s supportive turnout.

Several residents and staff from Jubilee and Coronation also attended the meetings, which were chaired by the only board member to vote against the closings, Mr David Close.

Mr Close said most people realised the hospitals were old and needed refurbishing or replacing. “But it is not satisfactory to plonk geriatrics in a general hospital. You cannot create the same homely atmosphere in a general ward.” Six months was not long enough to give staff and patients to move, he said.

A charge nurse at Coronation Hospital, Ms Liz Barrie, said she was concerned that geriatric nursing staff would be "pinched” for general wards in staffing shortages if the elderly were transferred to general hospitals.

“The elderly are low priority.” A former nurse who trained at Jubilee, Mrs Rosemary Troughton, said New Zealand had a health care system “second to none in the world.”

The Government needed to hear a strong message from Canterbury people deploring the need to reduce spending on health by $3O million, she said.

The hospitals reflected the quality of care that New Zealanders had come to expect, she said.

Another campaigner against the closings, Mrs Vel Lomax, said the board had targeted the elderly, because it thought that was where it would meet with the least resistance.