New Cooperative Venture For Dr 'Hokianga' Smith

Northern Advocate, 18 February 1949, Page 4

New Cooperative Venture For Dr 'Hokianga' Smith

RAWENE, Fri. (Sp.).—One of Northland’s most controversial figures, Dr G. M. Smith, will leave this area within a few weeks after a 35-year stay in what he himself terms “our sub-tropical climate.”

Dr Smith arrived from Scotland to take up the post of sole From the beginning he was outspoken on the matter of m of more recent years he has found a definite place apart from tl whose orthodoxy he has never failed to castigate in the most fort!

doctor in Hokianga. edicai practice and conduct, but le usual run of M.O.s and G.P.s, iright and compelling terms.

As director of the Hokianga Special Medical Service, he has enthusiastically pioneered the salaried doctor arrangement and has no hesitation in regarding the loca] set-up as the pilot light for the path that public medicine must eventually follow throughout this country.

Opinions, are hardly less cloven into two camps so far as laymen are concerned. His followers adulate, his detractors execrate.

anco of fol-de-rols will be known no more in the sleepy hollow where he made his mark.

Whatever they think of him, medico or citizen, Dr Smith preserves the attitude of not caring, proverbially, a continental hoot.

But it will not be lost on the New Zealand canvas. Indeed, it may be that his peculiar talents will become even more widely known and more controversial yet as time goes on. WILL START COOP. SCHEME

He has been a prolific writer and speaker in furtherance of his ideas of unorthodox treatment of the patient both in and out of hospital. He has enunciated and practised a number of treatment routines and approaches which are regarded by most other orthodox-minded medical men as still being in the discursive stage. His approach to hospital asepsis, his revolutionary ideas as to the use of nembutal in maternity work, his adherence to the use of oils as opposed to skin-grafting for serious burns, his postulation that a full hot meal daily for school children is excellent preventive practice in a community with a high tubercular tendency—these and other aspects of his work have attracted attention over a sphere far wider even than the shores of this Dominion. DOESN’T CARE A “HOOT

He has ever gone his own wild way in a strange kind of George M. Cohan brashness, outwardly at least ignoring praise and calumny alike. To the whole of New Zealand, the names of Dr Smith and Hokianga have become virtually synonymous.

For Dr Smith is going to the Wellington district, there to set up a cooperative group practice which will function along lines somewhat similar to the Hokianga model. Impatient at the slowness of grinding of departmental and Governmental mills, he is setting out in quixotic mood to tilt at the big target. He has all the confidence of Pizarro and Cortez, that with his handful of adherents, he can change the course of medical destiny. At Waikanae, the pleasant seaside resort north of the capital city, which has a seasonal population of up to 20,000 yet possesses no resident doctor, he and Matron N. Bedggood, late of Rawene. will plant their standards. They plan to start a purely cooperative group practice in which the much-despised Social Security seven-and-sixpcnces will be collected and pooled for general practitioner work. LIMITED SALARIES FROM POOL . Out of the pool, all salaries will be met. The doctor—and other doctors as they come in, for additions to the roll are envisaged—will receive the same salary which he has been receiving at Hokianga, £ISOO per annum plus travelling expenses. T will get all I want out of that,” says Dr Smith.

While he laboured at the county hospital in Rawene, patients came from far and near—from Southland and Otago, even from Australia, to undergo his treatments and his hospitalisation. STUDENTS WERE KEEN While he directed the special medical service, the finding of brilliant young students to take up salaried practice under him was merely a matter of sorting out the best from a lengthy list of applications. It was regarded as a definite asset to have been able to say: “I worked under Dr Smith, of Hokianga.” Now, at over 70, this tall, never-stiil. tatter-garbed petrel of medico-sur-gery, is leaving the district he has grown to love wholeheartedly. His amazing personality and his brusque Scots loquacity and intolei-

His own personality has at all times been a colourful one. In his outspokenness, particularly against the “seven-and-sixpenny quacks” of this era of state medicine—these are his especial betes-noires—he has aroused vigorous antipathies among his fellow practitioners.

He considers that his actual earnings should be at least around the £3OOO to £4OOO figure which he ascribes to the ordinary general practitioner under the present-day system. The surplus would go back into the pool and, when that is no longer necessary, back to the patients in the form of cheaper fees.

It is part of his driving •'ambition that the public should reap financial benefit fror|i the scheme. Salaries for matron and nurses would be on the same lines as now obtaining in Hokianga. A panel of district nurses is envisaged for Waikanae as in Hokianga, where, at the moment, there are six, each operating in a distinct area and each given the use of a car for her work. HIS IDEA OF “RESEARCH”

Dr Smith has been somewhat impatient of the report, quoted verbatim from his use of the phrase to a Hokianga Hospital Board meeting, that he was going to Wellington to undertake research work.

“The only research work I may do.” he declares, his blue eyes twinkling, “is an investigation of the morals, ethics and procedure of the Health Department.” Dr G. M. Smith will be replaced by Dr Hubert Smith, now medical officer of health at Wellington, but the continuation of the surname may prove to be the major link with the muchcliscussed past.