IMPROVING HOSPITALS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19292, 3 April 1926, Page 7

IMPROVING HOSPITALS

Sir,—Dr. MacEachern recommends: (a) The retention of the honorary system of staffing and the elimination of the present policy in some districts of employing fulltime "medical officers with dual functions, (b) The addition of paying wards to public hospitals, so that others than the "necessitous poor" would be able to use the hospitals and pay for their treatment. Now, in dealing with the honorary system, from inv own experience as a layman, I do not think there is any comparison between the two systems. Where there is an honorary staff the medical superintendent is really only a figure-head, tied by etiquette. In the average hospital the patients admitted on certain days arc given to certain doctors. Tf perchance you happen to be handed over to a man with a large private practice and your complaint is not interesting to him, tiien von simply lie there and put, up with it: "your treatment is in the nurses' hands, and the superintendent is really powerless. Surely it is better to give the superintendent a staff with whom he will make the rounds each day, and give suggestions if the treatment is not what he considers it ought to be. With the honorary staff he is not asked for suggestions and he dare not offer any. If a patient has a bad turn and the honorary man cannot be communicated with, as happened not long ago, nothing can be done, for etiquette prevails. Let those' districts with a permanent staff stick to their method. As to paying wards, does the average man realise what this means to him? lam a farmer, I pay hospital rates and lam poor, !Now, I cannot afford to pay perhaps twenty guineas for an operation, and a further five or six guineas a week for a paying ward. Am I then to be put in the "paupers" or "necessitous poor" ward, to bo nursed by junior probationers and attended by "under-grads" or first-year doctors, or'if my complaint is very interesting, to be experimented upon by the lionoraries for the benefit of those who can pay ? Nothing is more demoralising than charity. Start the pauper wards and hundreds, nay, thousands who are. now able to hold up their heads, will, after receiving charity, go to tho dogs. Surely, if the rich wish to enter a public hospital it would be better, to put a further tax on"*tea and tobacco and also tax diamonds, and thereby provide absolutely free treatment for everyone, rich and poor, in sickness. I think tho poor man or woman or child is as good as the rich. As I said, I pay hospital rates, therefore why should my wife, children, or myself, be classed as paupers it stricken with sickness or aecident, even : though I pay my grocer and baker, etc. . ! Pro Bono Publico.