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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Hospital pays mums $100 to go home early



Alt Tv/Fleet FM Breakfast News Comment
Hospital pays mums $100 to go home early
Mothers will be given a $100 supermarket voucher if they leave hospital within hours of giving birth, in a bid to deal with the national shortage of midwives. The two-month-long Capital and Coast District Health Board scheme has been tagged "bribery" by a health group. Board spokesman Michael Tull said yesterday: "We're encouraging people to go home straight from delivery ... without going to the post-natal ward." The vouchers cannot be used to buy alcohol or tobacco. The scheme revives similar ones used in Auckland and Waikato that were ditched in the 1990s after they failed to encourage shorter stays.

This is just outrageous, who would take the $100 food voucher? A mother who is extremely poor and desperately needs the food voucher, that level of poverty makes the mother a member of a high risk group whom we see time and time and time again leading the most difficult of lives. We rely on observation by a group of Social Services to make sure everyone is ok and that’s something that could be checked off over a 48 hour period, but to encourage poor people to leave within 6 hours making that observation time a mere glimpse in an over crowded and hectic hospital environment, just seems to me to border on the criminally negligent.

4 Comments:

At 29/11/07 9:08 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're right Bomber ... and for them to blame it on the shortage of mid-wives? Hello??? Mid-wives are there for the BIRTH, how is the mother going home straight away going to solve the mid-wife shortage??? Der!

NS

 
At 29/11/07 10:35 am, Blogger deleted said...

Bomber - can you please explain the link to capitalism?

If anything it shows that state monopolies on healthcare just don't work.

If the funding followed the patients, and was opened up to competition from private sector midwifes and birthing centres, than there would be more beds available with the same amount of funding.

Thats capitalism in action.

Instead the public sector gets the monopoly on funding, and you are stuck with rationing and shortages of supply, with excess supply being provided byt he private sector.

This can squarely be blamed on the labour governments ideological opposition to private sector healthcare.

 
At 30/11/07 10:31 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bomber. You don't know the half of it apparently South Auckalnd get them out within two hours without vouchers. what you didn't presume is that some poor people may also be too uneducated to realise they are entitled to some form of care after squeezing one out.

_YAAS Energi

 
At 4/12/07 3:50 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what were you saying Bomber about sacrificing taxcuts for social services. Scant evidence for it here.

 

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