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Dr David Becroft: Children’s Health Advocate
Dr David Becroft was an influential, and at times controversial, advocate for children’s health.
‘My enduring picture is of him sitting quietly at his favoured microscope reaching to examine yet another slide…’ This was one impression of Dr David Becroft, a paediatric pathologist whose career spanned the late 1950s to the 1990s. Becroft didn’t just focus on slides: he was an influential, and at times controversial, advocate for children’s health. His outspoken criticism of the closure of the paediatric laboratory service that he helped establish made headline news, as did the concerns of David and his colleagues about the shortcomings of the various plans for the development of a new children’s hospital.
Becroft trained in pathology from the mid-1950s, after graduating with a medical degree from the University of Otago in 1952 and spending time in clinical roles. His career direction into pathology was partially owing to chance, when he was appointed to a large cancer research unit at Boston and had to rapidly upskill - in his words: ‘to give the appearance of practising at a level appropriate for what was arguably the top children’s hospital in the world’. On the back of this influential overseas experience, he was appointed as Pathologist in Charge of the newly developing paediatric laboratory at Princess Mary Hospital for Children in Auckland.
‘My enduring picture is of him sitting quietly at his favoured microscope reaching to examine yet another slide…’
Dr David Becroft’s microscope, Marion Davis Library collection. This microscope was used extensively by Dr David Becroft when he worked at the Princess Mary Hospital for Children, now the Starship Hospital, as Pathologist in Charge of the clinical laboratories there from 1959 to 1992. He was also Perinatal Pathologist at the National Women's Hospital in Green Lane.
Becroft himself noted that his establishment of a comprehensive formal review process of paediatric deaths was at that time unique in New Zealand and rare internationally. This formed part of the comprehensive paediatric service that Becroft had ‘single-handedly developed at Princess Mary Hospital… which was the envy of any country’. This was at odds with the building itself, originally built to house WWII casualties, that by the 1970s was in a deteriorating state. On a tour of inspection of the old hospital in 1977, the then Minister of Health Mr Gill noted the poor building conditions, describing the gastroenterology ward as: ‘like a dungeon’, with peeling paint and outdated facilities. This contributed to the drawing up of designs for the new children’s hospital (what was to become known as Starship).
Becroft saw the specialised knowledge developed in his laboratory as being placed at risk with the planned merger with the general laboratory service in 1991 – in his words ‘a hostile takeover’. He took his arguments for the retention of the separate service for children as far as he could, first attempting a High Court injunction, then appealing to the Minister Health at the time, Simon Upton, both unsuccessful, and ultimately his position was disestablished.
As well as his development of the pathology service in general, Becroft had major involvement in several important studies into child mortality, including the New Zealand Cot Death Study, the National Childhood Cancer Study, and work on genetics and paediatric pathology. He continued to contribute to medicine long after his official retirement in the 1990s. Over 50 years Becroft contributed to 131 indexed publications from 1964 to 2014, a year before his death in 2015. Becroft was awarded an ONZM in 2001 for his services to Medicine.