OTAKI HOSPITAL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 149, 25 June 1943, Page 6

OTAKI HOSPITAL

NO READY ALTERNATIVE What was being done to bring the old ! people who had been transferred to the Otaki Beach Hospital back to Wellington? Mrs. Knox Gilmer asked at the meeting of the Wellington Hospital Board last night. It was far from ideal from any point of view. The staff was working most loyally under great disabilities, some patients were not satisfied, and relatives were really dissatisfied. Could the patients be accommodated later at the Trentham racecourse hospital? The chairman, Mr. F. Castle, said that when there appeared to be a possibility of attack on New Zealand the old people were, at the request of Cabinet, transferred to Otaki-to be out of danger. In some respects the Otaki Hospital was not bad, and for some patients was better, but others were dissatisfied. The solution lay in the completion of the building programme. [ The medical superintendent, Dr. J. Cairney, agreed. Providing that there was no increased military demand— which no one could say—the old people could be brought back when the building programme was completed, some to the Hutt Hospital and some to the Victoria Ward, Newtown. Trentham did not give the solution unless another • £5000 was to be spent there, and, in I any case, could the work be done? Relatives rather than patients were objecting, said Mr. H. F. Toogood, but, he suggested, that was because they did not appreciate how great were the difficulties. The average stay in hospital was a month. Some of the old people were in hospital as chronic cases for a year or longer. Would relatives, when they realised that to bring *a chronic case back to Wellington would mean that twelve acute cases must be denied urgent surgical treatment, still object to what was admittedly a considerable inconvenience? He was sure that they would not. It came back, like all the board's big problems, to delays in the building programme.