MATERNAL WELFARE

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 August 1928, Page 10

MATERNAL WELFARE

KEY TO SOLUTION

“In my opinion,” states the Inspector of Hospitals (Dr. T. L. Paget), in his annual report to lhe Health Department, “the key to the solution of the problem of promoting maternal welfare is co-operation between the expectant mother and her husband, a wcil-trained ante-natal clinic nurse, an alert and efficiently trained medical attendant, and well-trained maternity ntirso or midwife, and the Hospital Board’s services, which later can provide maternity hospitals for those cases requiring hospital attendance and services for sterilising outfits for all patients. Of these the most important factor is a medical attendant determined in ensuring aseptic conditions.

“The most useful work that the Health Department can do is in organising these forces so that they work harmoniously together to promote maternal welfare. Having satisfied myself that a reasonable standard of efficiency exists in the majority of the hospitals under my inspection. I intend to devote more time to organising work to promote the desirable co-operation indicated above.” Dr. Paget states that the general education of the expectant mother and of the public can best lie promoted through the formation of ante-natal clinics, and that is to be regretted that so few clinics have been started outside the four centres and the midwives’ training schools. “I am still in hopes,” he says “that the Phinket Society, with its many branches and nurses, its considerable income derived by subscriptions from the public and subsidy from the State through the Health Department, will become as active in its efforts to save the mother from illness and death as it has been to save the baby. There can bo no doubt that the greatest safeguard to the baby is a healthy mother, and that the main hope of reducing the number of still-births and deaths of infants in the first few weeks of life, which so far have resisted all. efforts, is by the widespread establishment of ante-natal clinics to give instruction and the necessary systematic ante-natal attention to the mother. The excellent, results of the Phinket Societies’ ante-natal clinics in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch are most encouraging, and I cannot help feeling that an inquiry by the Plunket Society would convince them that without detriment to the infant webfare work, of which they are justly proud, they might devote a still larger portion of their time, energy, and funds to the equally important work, which they have so admirably begun, of helping to save the mothers and reduce that class of infant mortality which up to the present has not been affected.”