Health care still a problem
Today the news media is rightly critical of hospitals struggling with Emergency Department wait times and the twin challenges of Covid-19 and winter
influenza. In an earlier era, when tuberculosis counted as a major health concern, the press was no less shy about voicing concerns.
The Waikato Sanitorium, a facility designed expressly to combat tuberculosis, opened in Cambridge in December 1903 and was deemed inadequate almost from the beginning.
Such was the need for its services that treatment had preceded the launch by a year, with initial patients housed in tents.
An opening capacity of 30 beds could not possibly service the hundreds of applicants, even with limits placed on the duration of stay.
In 1912 the New Zealand Truth published an expose, drawing on letters from disgruntled patients.
The standard of food was a common complaint.
One former resident stated that ‘‘the tucker is equal to a six-penny hash shop, the welfare . . . of the patients being a secondary consideration’’ and that ‘‘the climate is the only treatment there’’.
Another said that ‘‘I would stake my life that 50% better food than that supplied . . . at the Sanitorium can be had at the Salvation Army ‘doss’ house at four pence a time’’.
Two years later the paper followed up with a story about how Sanitorium management was more concerned with patients commenting to the press about the institution’s shortcomings than addressing the core problems.
The Truth noted a disparity between a blanket restriction on residents visiting Cambridge’s public houses and a special Sunday dinner, for a select few patients, at which ‘‘chicken, ale and wine and cigars were on tap’’.
In calling for a formal inquiry, it was claimed that favouritism toward certain patients was rife, with the matron labelling one who had fallen from grace a ‘‘loafer’’.
Further issues arose when the Sanitorium housed convalescing soldiers during World War I.
A prohibition on playing games or cards and the harsh treatment meted out to one veteran who had the audacity to walk the grounds with a lady friend — ‘‘practically solitary confinement’’ — was thought so draconian that seven patients left of their own volition.