Saturday, April 15, 2006

Public health - a permanent state of crisis

"The long suffering public is growing weary of reading about revolutionary advances in the world of medicine when it knows that in times of trouble it is nothing short of an achievement to gain admission to a public hospital to be treated by conventional means....last month Wellington Hospital's waiting list was suspended for two weeks because of an unusually high demand for beds and shortage of trained staff."

The column goes on to detail the numbers waiting for treatment at Wellington and Hutt hospitals and the new Health Minister's plan to cut the waiting times and lists. Can you guess which year this was?

(Clue; It's not 2006, cause Hodgson doesn't even have a plan.)

2 comments:

Richard said...

I'll take a guess... 1974? Isn't it time we stopped funding socialised medicine?

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Good guess. It was 1973. The new govt was Labour and the new Health Minister was Tizard. Thirty three years on and ......snap!