The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1929 GOING ON WITH A MENACE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 745, 19 August 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1929 GOING ON WITH A MENACE

FE Auckland Hospital Board continues to practise an obdurate disregard of the highest standard of health laws and the hest interests of the community, which it overloads with municipal taxation. It persists in its intention to build, on a site adjacent to the general hospital, a huge block for the treatment of infectious diseases. Alternative tenders are being called for the erection of an expensive building on an inexcusably ill-chosen site near the centre of the city.

Many protests against the board’s wicked policy have been made and recorded within the past year or two, but all of them have been unheeded with an aloofness that might easily, if perhaps erroneously, be interpreted as a callousness of purpose. Laymen, with perhaps only a little knowledge of a technical subject, have been content to protest on the ground that the projected special hospital threatened a menace to public health. Possibly they have been wrong in their attitude and anxiety. For the purposes of being fair to hospital administrators, let it be conceded that lay protesters have not known and do not yet know what they are talking about. But against that possible ignorance (and this also is perfectly fair) let us place representative medical opinion on the question. Dr. E. B. Gunson, who now represents his profession on the hoard, has recorded, quite openly from a public platform, this opinion: “No hospital board is entitled to despoil the beautiful slope of that hillside. It is an atrocity which should not be allowed.”

The “atrocity” is likely to he perpetrated. All that is now required to give tangible form to the board’s scheme, which defies the considered opinion of the world’s greatest authorities on the isolation and treatment of infectious diseases, is merely what the hoard’s chairman describes in this journal today as “a formal arrangement” concerning another change in the original scheme. There can he no doubt at all about the necessity of an infectious diseases hospital for Auckland. Existing facilities for the treatment of such diseases in the Dominion’s largest centre of population have been notoriously inadequate for years. Over a year ago the hospital administrators were wrathful against The Sun for having declared candidly as a matter of stark truth that the position then, as now, was a protracted scandal. A few months after that objection to our criticism Dr. Maguire, superintendent of the General Hospital, told the board plainly that the existing system of “makeshift accommodation” for infectious diseases was a menace to general patients. There actually had been a few cases of cross-infection, but the hoard (added Dr. Maguire, grimly) had been remarkably lucky. In view of these facts out of the mouths of officials, the board has done the right thing, as one of the main guardians of public health, in preparing for the ereetion of a modern hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases. But, in its choice of a site, the board has done the right thing in the wrong place, and knows that it is doing so. If one only could get to the centre of the hoard’s roundabout methods for advancing its policy of development in its own obstinate way, it probably would be discovered that the real aim of the administration is later to transform the projected infectious diseases block into necessary wards for the treatment of noninfectious diseases. This inference is made all the more reasonable because leading members of the board declare now that the limit of expansion in the area of hospital grounds in the heart of the city Kas been reached. As Dr. Gunson has also said, all that is required is an isolation block. The board’s chairman now admits that the revised plan makes provision for a separate building for the nurses to be employed at the new hospital for infectious diseases. But, Mr. Wallace has not said anything about the additional cost involved. Since the hoard is as a law unto itself, heeding no one outside its expert and inexpert circle, perhaps the Minister of Health will have something to say about its policy. He is higher than any law. Has he not declared that he had a Divine call to his humane work. Let him exercise his power in that belief.