Report of the Department of Health / New Zealand.

  • New Zealand. Department of Health.
Date:
[1963]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the Department of Health / New Zealand. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/120 (page 34)
    made it possible to extend many of the hospital services to the com¬ munity and to arm the general practitioner with the tools again to treat his patients in their homes after a relatively short hospital stay for the acute stage, or often indeed without the need for hospital admission at all. The general practitioner now has access to laboratory tests and to radiography to assist diagnosis, to all the modern drugs for treatment, to district nursing services, home-aid services, meals on wheels, hospital laundry services for old people, visiting physiotherapists and occupa¬ tional therapists, the provision of aids to daily living, to oxygen, artificial respirators, wheel-chairs, and other hospital equipment to enable his patients to be cared for in the familiar and beneficial atmosphere of home. A new group of community nurses is being trained to fit into this overall picture. For the year ended 31 March 1962 district nurses paid 598,000 visits to 77,000 cases; 226,000 meals were supplied through the meals-on-wheels scheme; 64,000 pieces of laundry were washed for old people who could not manage this at home; just on 1,000 cases were cared for by home aids; and physiotherapists and occupational therapists paid over 7,000 visits. Many of the individual stories behind these figures, of families kept together and of the benefit to people of care in their home and family environment, are heart-warming. Not that all these services are available everywhere or will be for a long time, for, apart from limiting factors of staff, not all hospital boards are yet by any means as active in these fields as they ought to be. The Department has done and will continue to do all it can to stimulate these developments - to encourage the active boards and to stir the inactive. It is not within the capacity of the country’s economy or the resources of the construction industry or the labour pool to provide and staff hospital beds for the growing population up to the level which may have been thought desirable or necessary in the past. The concepts of maximum provision of extra-mural services by hospitals and maxi¬ mum home care of people who would otherwise require to be in hospital offer not only the best approach to the provision of essential medical services for a rapidly growing population and to limiting hospital ex¬ penditure, but equally important a very desirable and much closer relationship between the hospital and the general practitioner in the best interests of the patient. Hospital Advisory Council The Hospitals Advisory Council met on two occasions during the year. Matters which were the subject of recommendation to the Minister were the changes in representation on hospital boards, the provision of ward telephones, the provision of filtration plants for hospital swim¬ ming pools, and hospital boards’ responsibility in operating home-aid services. With the Minister’s approval, the Council appointed a committee to investigate and report upon the current and future needs in cardiac surgery in New Zealand. The committee has heard evidence at Auck¬ land, Wellington, and Dunedin and expects to present its report before June 1963.