The campaign to save a rest home

Nelson Mail editorial, September 15, 2010
In the two weeks since the death knell was sounded for Golden Bay's only rest home, two things have happened: an impassioned community has started mobilising to try to save the Joan Whiting home; while those who have the power over its future have given every impression of sitting on their hands hoping to ignore the mounting anger and anxiety.
It is time to move the campaign to keep the home open up another gear, and it is time for those who hold the Joan Whiting home's fate in their hands to do the right thing. Today, the Nelson Mail is adding its voice and weight to the community's effort to stop the closure and ensure that the handful of elderly people living in the home are able to see out their years in Golden Bay.
We are joining those demanding the intervention of Health Minister Tony Ryall, for it appears that the inertia and buck-passing which has led to the Joan Whiting's predicament will only be broken with intervention from the highest level. We hope that all our readers who recognise the injustice and folly the Golden Bay community faces will join the effort to convince the decision makers to intervene.
The community's wish to keep Joan Whiting open - at least until new rest home facilities are available in the district - is hardly unreasonable or preposterous.
The argument is not about propping it up indefinitely against the odds (as much as that scenario might have its sympathisers within the Golden Bay community). It needs a lifeline - bridging finance - to ensure it can keep operating and so continue to be home to a dozen or so elderly people until the Bay's much-talked-of integrated health centre, including a new rest home, is open for business in Takaka.
Before now, all parties seemed to have accepted that aim was desirable. It is worth recalling that the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board previously provided the Joan Whiting trust with bridging funding on the expectation that the home would be incorporated into the new health campus.
The problem seems to be that the plans to get that campus off the ground have slowed to a crawl. The DHB has long since withdrawn its funding (which it has been at pains to argue it was never obliged to provide); other sources have also dried up; and the community-based Joan Whiting trust has found itself high and dry.
But really, the financial question - as pivotal as it is to the current circumstances - is secondary to the real issue, that of the simple humanity at stake. There is no sound justification for the scenario now faced, that when the money finally runs out at Joan Whiting - expected to be at the end of November - its remaining residents will be shipped off over the Takaka Hill and beyond to a new rest home. All are frail, some in very poor health. The prospect of uprooting and transplanting them to a foreign environment, because in essence the health bureaucracy can't get its act together, is scandalous. If ever there was an unjust problem with a straightforward solution simply begging for some sensible leadership, this is it.
We look forward to Mr Ryall filling the vacuum.