SHORTAGE OF DOCTORS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24034, 4 August 1941, Page 6

SHORTAGE OF DOCTORS

An admission which weakens .his demands for coercive measures against the doctors of New Zealand in the operation of medical benefits under the Social Security Act has been made by the Minister of Health, Mr. Nordmeyer. Faced with a request that he should consider the employment of overseas practitioners to provide medical service in country districts, Mr. Nordmeyer has had to confess that Great Britain, the United States and all the British Dominions are experiencing a shortage of medical men on account of the war and that consequently no great number of doctors can be imported from overseas. One of the coercive measures that some Government members have advocated has thus disappeared. But the matter goes further than that. The shortage of doctors applies quite definitely to New Zealand, a recent estimate being that 25 per cent of the Dominior/s medical men have been withdrawn from private practice for service with the armed forces, either at home or overseas. In these circumstances, coercive measures against those that remain become doubly unjustifiable. A free general practitioner service has been promised by the Government, but it

cannot be provided out of the revenue from social security taxation, which is insufficient to meet the cost of existing benefits. An unwilling professional service, therefore, could only be obtained by further transfers from general taxation. Meanwhile the doctors left in the Dominion have shouldered an additional burden cheerfully in continuing to serve their patients and those of their fellow practitioners now overseas. The Government would be well advised to drop all further talk of coercion.