HOSPITALS FINANCE

Taranaki Daily News, 20 February 1935, Page 7

HOSPITALS FINANCE

ANNUAL CONFERENCE REMITS. MANY IMPORTANT SUGGESTIONS. Remits which will be discussed by the annual conference of New Zealand hospital boards at Napier on March 5 were tabled at the meeting of the Taranaki Hospital Board yesterday and commented on briefly by members. Judging by the agenda paper the Napier session will be one of considerable importance in the domestic a. I national management of hospitals. Several of the remits contain suggestions for new taxation schemes to overcome the difficulty of hospital maintenance. The Stratford board will suggest that the present rating scheme should be altered to a basis of 50 per cent, population and 50 per cent, property. Buller asks for a more equitable system of taxation and suggests that all adults should be taxed for hospital maintenance unless specially exempted and that the tax coulC be levied in the same way as the present unemployment tax. Hokianga supports the remit but Grey suggests that it would be better for the money to be raised by a graduated tax on incomes. Other matters of considerable importance to be discussed include a suggestion that medical services should be nationalised and that sanatoria should be placed on the same basis. Waihi wants a revision of the present system of levying patients’ fees and uniformity of nurses and sisters’ salaries throughout the Dominion. South Otago seeks by a more progressive policy of road sealing the elimination of the menace to public health by dust. One remit called for particular comment by the Taranaki board, that suggesting that magistrates be given the power six years after the commission of a crime to reinstate the offender as eligible for old-age pension, provided they were satisfied the offender had reformed. The chairman, Mr. P. E. Stainton, remarked that this was a remit the Taranaki delegates might well support. Where a convicted person was not eligible for old-age pension it usually happened that that person became a charge on a hospital board or on some other charitable institution.

The Taranaki delegates to the conference will be Messrs. P. ,E- Stainton and E. R. C. Gilmour. Several remits deal with the more general problem of sterilisation of the mentally unfit, which will probably be very fully discussed. There will be an address to delegates on the subject by Mr. T. G. Gray, Direc-tor-General of Mental Hospitals in New Zealand. The South Otago board has signified its intention of moving definitely for the sterilisation of the physically unfit and the mentally deficient.