The Dominion SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1943. PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 226, 19 June 1943, Page 4

The Dominion SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1943. PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE

In the course of her speech in the Financial Debate on Thursday, Mrs. Grigg made a point that cannot be too often emphasized. New Zealand, she said, spent a lot of money on sickness, but she would like to see more spent on its prevention. New Zealanders, she added, should be ashamed and distressed that there was so much sickness. The speaker in this connexion was echoing the thought that must be in the minds of many. The strain on existing hospital accommodation and staffs, and the demand for more accommodation and more staffs, are matters of which the public is well aware. The extra pressure that has given rise to this position may be due, at least in part to the fact that as some people may now feel that they can seek medical advice and-hospital treatment under the Social Security Act without anxiety about payment, they make more frequent recourse to these benefits —in certain cases, no doubt, for ailments which ordinarily they would have regarded, as trivial. Other predisposing factors may be wrong habits of living. It would be interesting, indeed, if it were possible to have an analysis of all the' factors, material and psychological, that have contributed to the very definite rise in the incidence of sickness which has taken place within the last few years in this country. New Zealand is one of the healthiest and least poverty-stricken countries in the world, a country in which the hospitals should be half-empty instead of over-flowing, and doctors, instead of being kept at high pressuie, given the time and opportunity to do their work under less exacting conditions and with greater satisfaction to themselves and to their patients. On the face of it, there is neither rhyme nor reason for the present state of affairs. What is obviously needed is a new. line of State policy in regard to the.public health, and a new mental attitude on the part of the public in the matter of physical well-being. The Mother Country is on the. brink of initiating somewhat similar measures of social insurance and medical benefits to those now in operation here. There has been much discussion, some of it highly critical, of the Beveridge Plan upon the recommendations of which, it is expected, forthcoming legislation will be largely based. ; One. of the most authoritative and instructive contributions to the discussion was a speech by Lord Dawson of Penn,' the eminent Physician in the House of Lords during a two-day debate on this Plan. While urging the virtues of patience and wise statesmanship in legislating for what was plainly an ideal which must necessarily require time for its full realization on a sound basis, the speaker said that thei e were certain matters ready (indeed over-ready) for tackling now. The first was to bridge the gap between preventive and curative medicine. The detachment of these two branches had been to the disadvantage of both and an equal disadvantage to the public service. To bring them together was a first essential.

Hospital practice and general practice (he snlcl) must comprise the care of people’s health, the furtherance of health as their chief objective; and similarly the medical officers of health must come out of Jheir obscurity on to the Staffs of the hospitals and meet regularly among their colleagues. Even more' Important than this is so to alter medical education that the student from his early days will be taught to give precedence to the building up of health over the cure of sickness. It is not possible, for reasons of space, to mention various suggestions made by Lord Dawson for advancing the principles he so strongly emphasized. One of these was somewhat on the lines suggested by Mrs. Grigg in her speech in Parliament when she urged the plan ot mobile clinics to go round the schools. Lord Dawson considered that the best results in this connexion would accrue from a group system of clinical contacts between the people and the medical profession in every area, a system which, he thought, would foster the kind ot co-operation needed to give the right emphasis to the. preventive side of medicine. The sum of the matter simply is that if there is overconcentration on the curative side expenditure, will, grow and become a drag on the scheme; if the preventive side is given its right place in the scene, more funds will be available for concentrating, upon treatment and research in diseases, such as cancer, tuberculosis, an infantile paralysis, which still constitute a standing challenge to the safetv and well-being of communities.