Hospital Policy

NZMJ, 1926

It is unnecessary to refer here in any detail to Hospital Policy in view of the full report of the “round-table” conference which appears in another part of this issue. The people of New Zealand are indebted to the broad and generous minded men who released Dr. MacEachern from his important duties at home to place the benefit of his advice and experience before New Zealanders. It is evident, as the result of this visit, that the Press and the public are alive to the importance of hospitals as national institutions, and they realise that no system is so perfect that it is not capable of improvement. The Governments of Victoria and of New South Wales eagerly proclaimed their sponsorship of Dr. MacEachern in an advisory capacity. The New Zealand Government very modestly appeared anxious by way of contrast, to give the medical men, through the Medical Association, the responsibility and, we trust, the credit of enlisting our distinguished visitor’s services in the cause of progress and humanity. Any hesitancy on the part of our Government should be relieved by the promised active co-operation and the encouragement of the medical profession, the Press, the Hospital Boards Association, and we believe also by the more thoughtful section of the general public.

The curse of hospital policy in New Zealand is politics. Politicians multiply the number of hospital districts, not in the interest of patients, but for political reasons. Ministers of the Crown in charge of hospital administration come and go with the turn of the political wheel, and they cannot raise hospital policy out of the political arena. Can a Minister tackle the solution of a uniform policy of hospital staffing or are local prejudices and predictions to prevail haphazard? What is good for Wanganui cannot be bad for Hamilton. When two systems are diametrically opposed, one must be better than the other. Medical men will generally agree that to place a good hospital of fifty beds or more under the full control of a more or less inexperienced doctor with the help, perhaps, of a house surgeon, to exclude the services of good experienced men practising in the district, to prevent co-operation and emulation, is to do a grave wrong to the people, some of them unthinking, who go as patients to such a hospital. If the great majority of medical men are wrong in this opinion they are surely entitled to be set right by the Department or the boards, or whatever persons are the authors of a system which is condemned in every progressive country in the world. Let this policy be justified or else swept away, but not ignored. Much useful reform of the present hospital, which is in some ways admirable, can now be effected by the co-operation of the Department, the boards and the medical profession. The new Minister of Health gives promise of progressive ideas, the Department has declared itself in favour of innovations of far-reaching effect, hospital development has now become a public question, and surely within this year into which we have not very far entered we shall have some practical outcome to all the thought and discussion which have centred upon the hospitals of this country. The medical profession, as experts in the treatment of the sick, will be false to itself and to its traditions if it allows in silence any considerations, political or otherwise, to set a limit to continued progress in hospital as well as in private practice.