Under a for the hospital precinct finalised last week,the emergency department,which is due to open next month,was slated to be demolished and relocated to a new clinical services building.
Artists’ impressions of the new $36 million emergency department at Albury Base Hospital.Supplied
Late on Monday afternoon,Park said the demolition of the new building was “never under consideration by this government”.
“This was a master plan,not government policy,” he said.
The upgrade of the emergency department began in July 2022,months before the NSW and Victorian governments on a complete overhaul of the hospital,adding to the $108 million already pledged by the federal government.
A Victorian government spokesperson said there were no plans to demolish the new emergency department as part of the $558 million upgrade,which they said would help “reduce ED wait times and allow more patients to be seen”.
A Health Infrastructure NSW spokesperson said the master plan “includes high-level information on future potential expansion zones” and any future stages of redevelopment fall outside the scope of the current project.
At a summit in Wodonga on Friday,community members,politicians and hospital staff criticised the decision to upgrade the existing hospital in Albury,rather than sticking to a 2021 plan to amalgamate two hospitals – one in Albury and a smaller campus in Wodonga – on a vacant block of land.
Park told a budget estimates hearing last month that the government decided to stick with the current site because taxpayers had already spent millions on the new emergency department,urgent care ward and cancer centre.
“We wanted to make sure that those things were not essentially pulled down after they had been invested in by the previous government,I acknowledge,fairly recently,” he said.
NSW Greens MLC and spokesperson for Health Dr Amanda Cohn.Dominic Lorrimer
NSW Greens MLC Amanda Cohn,previously an emergency doctor at Albury Hospital,said the new facilities were desperately needed,but that should not be a justification for keeping the hospital in its current location.
“Saddling the community with this inappropriate brownfield redevelopment to make the most of the new ED is a real waste of taxpayers’ money,” she said.
Health services are split across multiple sites across Albury and Wodonga,and patients are often moved across the border to receive care.
The hospital’s maternity ward,for example,is in Victoria’s Wodonga hospital. This means mothers experiencing complications with birth need to be moved by ambulance to emergency and surgical services in Albury,said Border Medical Association co-chair,Dr Barb Robertson.
“There are the big risks to patients,young and old,when they deteriorate and need specialists,” she said. “The ridiculousness is that if they had gone down the path of building what was planned in 2021 we would be halfway home.”
Albury Wodonga Health chief executive Bill Appleby and board chair Jonathan Green wrote to the NSW and Victorian governments in December saying it was clear from the concept planning phase that the $588 million investment would not be enough to deliver the services promised to voters,patients and staff.
“We are finding the current situation difficult for us to champion with our clinicians and community and would appreciate the opportunity for discussions directly with you,” the letter read. “The likely reality that our city will need to continue to endure a split acute/sub-acute hospital configuration … is grossly disappointing.”
Park said he would respond to the hospital “shortly”.