SHORTAGE OF DOCTORS.

Evening Star, Issue 22576, 18 February 1937, Page 16

SHORTAGE OF DOCTORS.

IX> TUI IDITOB.

Sir, —The superintendent of .the Avondale Mental Hospital informs me that the medical staff of that institution consists of four doctors, available for the care and attention of some 1,400 patients—i.e., on© medical man for every 350 patients. It is an alarming indication of the apathy with which New Zealanders can contemplate the sufferings, of mentally sick people that this state of affairs is very rarely commented upon by either men or women speakers in vheir public addresses. The advance of “ civilisation ” is presenting mankind with a rapid increase in the incidence of nervous disability, and world trends are nowadays in the direction of the merging of mental hospital departments into those of comprehensive health departments, to the end that the stigma may be eliminated from mental disability, and that cures may be made the more quickly and the more effectively. The reform in question has already been accomplished in Oxford City, England, where Sir Farquhar Buzzard (of the Medical Research Council) states that similar action on the part of mental hospital authorities elsewhere is evolutionarily inevitable. The Minister of Mental Hospitals in New Zealand writes me that “ mental illnesses aro treated just as comprehensively as any physical illness.’’ It is very difficult to understand this attitude, in view of the present overcrowding of our mental hospitals by about 1,000 surplus patients, and also in view of the statement made by the Avondale superintendent above. Dr Craven, in charge of the Auckland Public Hospital, tells me that for the patients of that hospital (who usually average about 700) there is a staff of 50 medical men available —i.e., one doctor to each 14 patients. Is it to be inferred that in New Zealand mental patients differ from those of the overseas world, in that they do not need more than about a twenty-fifth part of the medical attention now being given to those who are suffering from physical illnesses?— I am, etc.,

(Mrs) Ysabel Daldt, Onehunga, February 13.