MATERNITY SERVICES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22020, 1 August 1933, Page 8

MATERNITY SERVICES

FACILITIES IN DUNEDIN GOVERNMENT'S UNFULFILLED PROMISE ' (Per United Press Association.) NEW PLYMOUTH. July 31. A protest against the inaction of the Government in not providing the obstetrical hospital at Dunedin which was promised, especially in view of the fact that the women of the Dominion had contributed £31,000 towards the endowment of the Chair of Obstetrics, was made at a meeting of women representative of many organisations at New Plymouth to-day. An appeal for Government action was made by Dr G. Home, president of the New Zealand division of the British Medical Association, and the following motion was carried: —"That this meeting of women, feeling that no effort should be spared to reduce the maternal mortality rate in New Zealand, respectfully urges upon the Government the necessity for avoiding further delay in the erection- of the promised obstetrical hospital." Reviewing the recent history of the proposal Dr Doris Gordon stated in a letter to the meeting that when the Obstetrical Society set out to realise £25,000 to endow a Chair of Obstetrics the Government had then just promised to build a new maternity hospital at a cost of £50,000 for the Dunedin Medical School. The hospital was long overdue, the teaching authorities having had to make shift with two little inadequate hospitals—the Batchelor and St. Helens Hospitals—both old converted residences, and the accommodation was so cramped that it was impossible for groups of students to live in residence while doing two or three weeks' concentrated obstetrical work, this being a condition laid down as a necessity by the General Medical Council of Great Britain, the board which standardises and assesses the medical degrees throughout the Empire. The Obstetrical Society appealed to the women of New Zealand to raire £25,000 to endow a Chair of Obstetrics, and a marvellous response had been made. The University authorities were able to appoint Professor Dawson, a most energetic and enthusiastic teacher and worker, but the hospital had never been built. The Acting Prime Minister (Mr J. G. Coates) recently announced that the Government intended to release £500,000 for various purposes. A deputation from the society and another from the Medical School immediately waited on the Minister of Health asking him to make representations to the Minister of Finance to redeem his promise of a hospital, which, it was estimated, could now be built for £35,000. The Ministers reply was that he would bring the matter before Mr Coates, but during the interview he indicated that perhaps the best the Medical School could hope for was that £4OOO would be spent on enlargements to the existing St. Helens Hospital in Dunedin. This building was over 50 years old, and no matter what sums were ultimately spent upon it, it would never come up to the minimum requirement scheduled by the British Council as necessarv for a maternity teaching hospital. Within a week of the deputation's interview it had been announced that the Government was financing the Wellington railway station and the Dunedin Post Office, both costing four to eight times' as much as the much-needed maternity hospital. • , . • , . The Obstetrical Society pomteaV out that the Batchelor Hospital was 'overcrowded, and that the increased mimber of junior medical students now in the school would render the teaching of practical midwifery hopeless in another two or three years unless drastic measures were taken. Neither the society nor the women of the Dominion, once they understood the situation, would be content to see good money wasted on additions to obsolete and inconvenient hospitals which could never at any expenditure be brought up to the standard demanded by the General Medical Council of Great Britain.

Dr Home strongly endorsed Dr Gordon's remarks. The main factors which he stressed- were the necessity for movement and the undue and largely preventable bodily sickness, and occasional deaths of recently delivered mothers, and the death or disablement of some-ot the physically best of new born babies. The lastmentioned fact was not being widely or adequately realised, said Dr Home, lne safety' and health of the people was the highest law and the first and greatest consideration was prevention of death and sickness among the inhabitants of the country, especially those who were full of potentialities. The Plunket system took care of New Zealand babies after they were born, but infant deaths and disablements coincident with birth were often due to mechanical difficulties which were naturally outside the province of the Plunket or any other system, except that of adequate midwifery teaching. The projected Wellington railway station and Dunedin Post Office are mere conveniences, but a maternity teaching hospital was a necessity towards the saving of lives, and health. The railway station and post office were merely local and provincial, whereas the new maternity hospital would be of great local benefit to the women of Dunedin, but it would also contain a larger issue of being, of life-saving importance to the whole Dominion worked out in terms of plain, unemotional economics. It meant putting, say, £40,000 into one scale against a recurring annual loss of some of the healthiest of our women and of some of the physically fittest of our new-born babes into the other scale. Could there be any more urgent or more disinterested public appeal?