New Zealand News
New Zealand News (<Communicated)
The P.M.W. (National, Physical and Mental Welfare) Board of New Zealand comprises some hundreds of social workers, writers, speakers, Members of Parliament and medical men. Its objectives are the reduction of the ” time-gap ” in the application of science and scientific methods to :?(1) the Prevention, (2) the Amelioration, and (3) the Cure of the physical, mental and moral disabilities of the race.
The proposals of the P.M.W. Board at present before the Government comprise :?
(a) The merging of the Mental Hospitals Department into an augmented Health Department, whose province shall be particularly the prevention of ill-health. (b) The administration of the Health Department to be per medium of a Governing Board representative of the various sciences concerned in the maintenance of racial health, i.e., Applied Biology, Chemistry, Dentistry, Economics, Education, Endocrinology, Ethics, Eugenics, Hygiene and Sex Hygiene, Medicine (including the establishment of a Chair of Pediatrics), Nutritional Physiology, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Politics, Psychiatry, Psychology, Physical Education, Physics, Physiology, Religion, Sociology, and other sciences.
(c) In regard to the Amelioration of the condition of mental patients, the BoardingOut system to be temporarily and immediately adopted, in order to relieve congestion at the Mental Hospitals, with a view later of the Colony system reinforcing the present institutional system.
The civic rights of ex-patients of mental Hospitals to be safeguarded by legislation.
(e) Legislation to be enacted to prevent the incarceration in asylums of patients registering high-temperature during illness.
(f) The provision of a permanent clinic at each school in the Dominion, under the control of a qualified person whose duties shall be the frequent examination of the children?physical, mental and moral?together with the supervision of their physical education, and short talks out of school hours on elementary hygiene, nutritional physiology, biology, etc.
The Director-General of Mental Hospitals, in his 1936 Report to the House of Representatives, states:
” For many years most of our hospitals have been overcrowded, in some cases seriously so, and attention has frequently been drawn to the shortage of accommodation, but no effective long-range building programme has ever been evolved to meet the inevitable increase in population.”
The propaganda of the P.M.W. Board of new Zealand is released weekly in twenty New Zealand newspapers, by personally written editorials and reviews in various journals, and by addresses to the women’s organisations and social service societies. Facilities by radio are now being sought.
The Board’s Officers are :?President, Dr D. G. McMillan, M.P., Dunedin; Vice-President, Dr Guy Chapman; Hon. Solicitor, E. J. V. Dyson, LL.B., Auckland; Treasurer, Robert J. Peter, Auckland; Supervisor, Mother Machree, Onehunga.
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