INDUSTRIAL HEALTH EXPERT FROM ENGLAND DISCUSSES N.Z. FACTORIES

Grey River Argus, 24 May 1947, Page 7

INDUSTRIAL HEALTH EXPERT FROM ENGLAND DISCUSSES N.Z. FACTORIES

P.A. CHRISTCHURCH, May 22. _ “It is very clear that the conditions- of some factories is very good, and of some not so good, and it is also very clear that there is quite a big task to be done if we are to bring up the standard of factory conditions in this country to the level of the housing conditions,’ ’said Doctor T. O. Garland, who in February, arrived from England to open the Division of Industrial Health in the Health Department. In an interview to-day, Dr. Garland said that the new Division of the Health Department had no stalf yet, as he thought it better, in the first three months, to try to get the background of the factory conditions in New Zealand. To that end, he had spent almost his entire time going over factories in the four centres. He had seen more than one hundred so far. As a newcomer, he was impressed with the obvious absence of slum housing, but he did not think that the claim that New Zealanders led the Old Country in relation to housing existed in relationship to their varying conditions. Dr. Garland said that, the actual range of the standard of factories was extreme. He had been into some factories which could not be beaten anywhere, but there were some very surprisingly bad factories. The majority were somewhere intermediate in the scale. “I think that what we require is a pool of information on matters that affect health at work, and machinery for collecting further knowledge, and an increase in the consciousness of the importance of healthy working conditions,” said Dr. Garland. “Most managements had been most co-op-erative in showing him their premises. On a matter like health in industry there was relatively common ground between the management and the workers. A man who had had only medical training needed a considerable amount of instruction, both from the workers and Ihe management, on matters affecting health, for the normal medical man’s training never took him into a factory so as to obtain a cross section of the working conditions. He had gone into factories, big and small, and deliberately into good factories and bad.