THE N.Z. MANUFACTURERS' FEDERATION.

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 97, 21 October 1932, Page 6

THE N.Z. MANUFACTURERS' FEDERATION.

HOSPITAL REFORM

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —In my earlier letter I asked Dr. Campbell Begg to produce evidence that the several ex-legislators" and hospital inspectors named by him had ever advocated the establishment of a central Board of Hospitals possessed of the extraordinary powers that the National Expenditure Commission and Dr. Begg advocated. - In reply he quotes words uttered by the Hon. P. A. Bulkley, whose name was not among those-listed by Dr. Begg previously. The quotation has no reference whatever to the'setting up of a Board of Hospitals, and it was made in 1881, four years before our first Hospitals and Charitable Institutions Act reached • the Statute Book. Contenting himself with this quite irrelevant reply to my specific inquiry, Dr. Begg enumerates the sources, varied much in point of time and location, from which the Commission has selected the material for its report. I wish to confine my remarks to the two main recommendations previously discussed, namely, the Board of Hospitals and the divorcing of charitable aid from public nospitals. For the former the Commission has, it is explained, adopted the model of the. State of New South Wales. That form of hospital control came into existence in 1929 under a vastly different set of conditions to those existing in this Dominion. There were and still are no hospital districts but simply a large number of virtually independent hospitals similar to what we designateseparate institutions. The finances of many of the hospitals of New South Wales at any rate are recently reported to be 'in a very bad way, and although it would be absurd to blame their Hospitals Commission for this state of affairs, surely it is necessary to inquire what has been actually achieved under that system before adopting it as a model. As its example for dissociating charitable aid from public hospitals the Commission has, according to Dr. Begg, considered "recent developments in the of the English hospitals from the poor law." It appears to me he is under a serious misapprehension as to the nature of those 'changes. The principal alteration, as I understand it, was. to place the responsibility for the administration of the poor law on the larger county councils and county borough councils who also have been entrusted with the administration of the poor law hospitals. The following extract from a Ministry of Health circular- of 20th March, 1930, emphasises this: "The Minister desires that local authorities shall be in no doubt as to the lines on which he would earnestly hope that development should take place. He regards the policy of transferring responsibility for the poor law to the counties and county borough councils as being the first step in the process of breaking up the poor law, and particularly as placing the responsibility in question in the hands of authorities who have powers of prevention as well as of relief especially in regard to the large mass of destitution arising out of sickness and invalidity." If an English "model" for the Commission's recommendation to transfer the responsibility for charitable aid to 313 (sic) local authorities is required, it seems necessary to go back about a century.—l am,. etc., W. H. Mc-INTYRE. Messrs. G. Mitchell and A. Cowlcs have been appointed members of the .National War Funds Council.