The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 1924. MATERNAL MORTALITY.

Southland Times, Issue 19279, 25 June 1924, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 1924. MATERNAL MORTALITY.

Sir Maui Pomare has been employed in answering some direct criticism of the St. Helens Maternity Hospitals published in the Dominion, and in, his replies he has displayed some warmth without reaching any decision. Attacks on the technique of the St. Helens Hospitals will tend to cloud the main issue, which goes very much deeper than disputes over the technique of maternity cases. In one place the Minister for Public Health declares that there has never been an outbreak of sepsis in a St. Helens Hospital resulting in as many deaths as in the Kelvin case, and he goes on to say: It is sheer nonsense to say that labours conducted on St. Helens Hospital methods provide abundant cases for the surgical wards of our hospitals. These methods obtain in Denmark and other countries where maternal mortality is lowest and where the medical attendant is only summoned in abnormal cases. The public will not be deceived by such blatantly untrue statements. If what your correspondent says were founded on fact, would many mothers return again and again, as they do, to the St. Helens Hospitals for their second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and even eighth or ninth confinement

The reply to Sir Maui Pomare is that there are no figures available to the public to show how many cases of sepsis have occurred in the St. Helens Hospital, and that there is good reason to believe that notification has not been made of every case of sepsis sent to the general hospitals in spite of the regulations. The Department of Public Health, aware of the absence of details, may talk easily about the low death rate at the Government hospitals, but the chief trouble for the Department is that its published statistics are too good for human consumption. The references to Denmark and other countries with low rates of maternal mortality cannot be accepted without the qualification that the women of these countries have not been made so highly sensitive by modern civilisation as have the women of Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand. Obviously in any investigation of this problem comparisons of one country with another can only be of value when the whole circumstances are taken into account. The Department of Public Health cannot expect to eliminate the effects of years of civilisation on the woman of this country, and it must accept the fact that expectant mothers in New Zealand do not display a preference for the Government institutions in spite of the advantages claimed for them by the Department. Sir Maui Pomare declares that the public will not be deceived by blatantly untrue statements, but that is just one of the dangers to be faced: the statistics relating to the St. Helens Hospitals are untrue in that they do not give all the facts. Sir Maui Pomare can be confidently challenged on this point, and until the actual history of the St. Helens Hospitals ju thia country « Ptade knumn,

would be suicidal to accept them as the solution of the maternal mortality problem in this country. The Minister quotes the report of the Kelvin Commission in support of the Department, but a long experience in this country has reduced the confidence placed in the reports of commissions where departments are involved directly or indirectly, and it will be found, we think, that public confidence will rest finally with the humble general practitioner. The basis of the Department’s case is the conveyance of infection from one case to another by medical men or nurses in private institutions. The medical man is effectually protected from this attack by the records obtained in Britain and in America which show that the lowest percentage of cases of puerperal pelvic infection was revealed in connection with births in private houses, some of them necessarily under conditions which could not be called aseptic. The point to which the Department has yet to reply is that its case for the elimination of private maternity hospitals and the extension of the St. Helens Hospitals is based on an inaccurate appreciation of the problem and is wholly out-of-date in view of modern information on the subject.