Community keeps hospital alive
Faced with the closure of their hospital, the Te Aroha community pulled together.
looks back.
Barbara Hill remembers the day a public meeting was called to discuss the future of their hospital in Te Aroha like it was yesterday.
It was 1995, and the government at the time had announced that they were ‘‘exiting’’ smaller hospitals - Te Aroha was one of them.
Two hundred people packed into the meeting and at the end of it, nine volunteers had put their names forward to come up with a plan to save their hospital.
A steering committee was established to investigate the possibility of the community taking over the hospital.
All the first members of the steering committee were wellrespected members of the Te Aroha community.
‘‘We all felt an attachment to it (the hospital),’’ Barbara said.
‘‘The community as a whole put their hands up and said yes let’s do this!’’
The hospital originally operated as a maternity hospital, under the Waikato Health Board and was officially opened in 1961 by the Minister of Health at the time, Norman Shelton.
Lawrence House, which was named after local doctor Richard Lawrence was the nurse’s home and what is now the day club, was once the Matron’s residence.
When births started to drop off, they made half the hospital into a maternity wing and half geriatric.
Like most things in a small town, the hospital had become an integral part of Te Aroha.
The steering committee called on help from other hospitals who were in a similar situation and were given access to a council office at the time to worked on a comprehensive business plan.
‘‘We worked hard for two years to get everything in order,’’ Barbara said.
Some of the key points of the business plan were that it was the only facility in Te Aroha which offered day care, rest home and geriatric facilities on one site and the fact that it would be run by a community trust.
On December 9, 1996 the Te Aroha and District Health Services Charitable Trust took responsibility for the continued care services at Te Aroha Hospital including Lawrence House rest home.
Contracts were established with Midland Health and a 99 year lease arrangement entered into with Health Waikato, which allowed the Trust to make use of the hospital site.
The trust was reliant on accessing funds from the Crown’s Community Assistance Scheme to allow the purchase of the hospital by the community.
Bequests and generous donations from members of the community including Michael O’Donoghue went towards the purchase of new equipment.
They started operating as a business, and Barbara said they have run on a month to month basis. There are currently nine board members who meet monthly.
The hospital was surplus crown land, which is now part of the Hauraki Iwi settlement cur- rently with the Office of Treaty Settlements.
At its December 2016 AGM, the trust celebrated 20 years in operation.
The future looks bright for the Te Aroha Community Hospital and Lawrence House with plenty of plans in place moving onward and upward.
‘‘It has been difficult at times,’’ Barbara said.
‘‘But we got through with the support of the community, which has been invaluable.’’