NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 21, 19 October 1944, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

The serious shortage of nurses has been the subject of frequent recent notice in these columns. The recruiting campaign opened in Wellington on Monday, and continuing till Friday, October 27, should need no stressing of the importance of its objective. The number of patients in the public hospitals has outstripped the number of nurses required to cope satisfactorily with the work and at the same time provide conditions for the nursing staffs to ensure that their physical capacities will not be overtaxed by excessively long spells of duty, resulting in breakdowns. That is the case in a nutshell. Nursing is a noble calling, with a special appeal to the highest instincts of womanhood, to its spirit of sacrifice and service. It is to be hoped that the response to the recruiting appeal will be satisfactory. There would, however, be less cause for anxiety about the nursing shortage were the material rewards and privileges for the sacrificial nature of this calling more commensurate with the high quality of its services. An official assurance that this aspect of the problem will be given early ..attention would be timely at this stage.

This week the community is once again obliged to suffer the drain on time and effort which, inevitably, is caused by the mass distribution of forms and licences. The occasion is the issue of new ration books, which imposes a heavy strain on the Post Office find in addition means the loss of thousands of man-hours from one end of the country to the other. All the world over State systems of rationing create this national handicap, but in New Zealand it is intensified by the fact that the emergency form-filling made necessary by the war is superimposed upon a variety of permanent obligations of a similar sort. Today the citizen is required to queue-up not only for his ration book, but also to make social security payments, to procure application forms for social security benefits, to cash benefit chits, to pay tax on income other than wages, and to make the dozen-and-one different applications which may be necessary in the conduct of his business and family .affairs. Many people spend bouys every month in this fashion, and the time lost—to say (nothing of the tonnage of paper used—represents an appreciable part of the community’s recurring and nonproductive expenditure.