Financial support provided

Press, 7 September 1989, Page 26

Financial support provided

The Nurse Maude Foundation has been established to provide financial support for the district nursing organisation known by most people as simply “Nurse Maude.”

Its full title is the Nurse Maude District Nursing Association and it has been at the forefront of community-based health care in Canterbury for almost 90 years.

In that time it has grown from the original staff of one — Nurse Sibylla Maude herself — to more than 600 full time and part-time workers. As it has expanded to meet demand for its home-based nursing and domiciliary support services, its budget requirements have also grown proportionately.

To a large extent costs are met by allocations from Government via the Canterbury Area Health Board, although the association contributes substantially to the costs of maintaining the quality and quantity of its many services.

According to the chairman of the association’s board, Mr Colin Averill, the level of Nurse Maude financial input is increasing each year. This, coupled with Gov-ernment-imposed cost restraints on the public health sector, has caused the association to carefully consider its long-

term future funding options.

Mr Averill said Nurse Maude’s work was assisted by bequests and donations from many individuals and organisations.

But Nurse Maude could not rely with assurance on ad hoc levels of financial support from the community under current political and economic conditions.

"We have agreed we must place our funding requirements on a more secure and dependable basis,” Mr Averill says. “For this reason we have formed the Nurse

Maude Foundation. “Its task will be to act as a controller of finances for all our operations in district nursing and domiciliary support work.

“The foundation will help by attracting and investing funds and by ensuring that expenditure on Nurse Maude work in the community is undertaken as effectively as possible.” In the long term the foundation would take on an increasingly important role in obtaining and administering funds on behalf of the association.

“We expect to continue being funded for our dis-

trict nursing work from Government sources, as we have been for many years,” he says.

“But there seems little doubt that in the future we will have to rely more on our own sources of income, especially if Nurse Maude is to expand the scope and number of its services.

“Given the continuing rise in demand for our activities, there will certainly be a need for wider involvement in community nursing and support services.”

With the added strength of the foundation providing a secure financial

platform, the association will be better placed to meet this demand and perform cost-effective work in the community, he says.