A $558m redevelopment of Albury Base hospital jointly proposed by the New South Wales and Victorian state governments has outraged healthcare workers and community groups, who claim both governments misled them during a years-long consultation.
“If I was going to design a system to hide the dismal plans they’ve provided us, I’d design it exactly the way they’ve done it,” says Michelle Cowan from local community group Better Border Health. “These are the oldest tricks in the book. It’s the most cynical exercise so they can say they’ve ticked the consultation box.”
Dr Barb Robertson, the chair of local health advocacy group the Border Medical Association, says last month’s announcement of a plan to redevelop the Albury hospital, rather than build a new combined health campus as was recommended in consultations with stakeholders, is “straight out of an episode of Utopia”.
“[The state governments] clearly have no understanding that the largest regional health service between Sydney and Melbourne is operating at a severely compromised capacity,” Robertson says. “We’re in a perpetual fight every day for beds. Admitted patients are being left in waiting rooms. We have horrendous surgical waiting lists. This redevelopment will barely cover the significant gap in beds and theatres that we have now.”
For years, local health stakeholders called for the region’s healthcare services – currently spread across two cities in two states – to be consolidated into one greenfield hospital development.
But the new Albury Wodonga health master plan, published by both state governments in October, instead commits to the staged redevelopment of the current Albury Base hospital site. The NSW government says that further detail on how many new beds or facilities the redevelopment will include will be published in 2024.
An earlier draft master plan, circulated internally in December 2021 and obtained by NSW Greens MLC Dr Amanda Cohn through a freedom of information request in September 2023, shows that both state governments appeared to agree with recommendations to consolidate both hospitals into one new site.
Notes from a consultation held by Albury Wodonga Health in November 2021, attended by local health stakeholders and representatives from both state health departments, state that all parties “agreed that the greenfield option would be adopted for the remaining processes involved in the development and completion of the master plan”.
Internal NSW Health notes prepared for a meeting in the office of then-treasurer Matt Kean in that same month note that local health stakeholders had “a strong preference for the greenfield option”. It said that was based on “assessment against a number of criteria including improved amenity for patients and staff, ease of construction, timeliness of development and the likely adverse impact on operations associated with a staged ‘brownfield’ development”.
However, those notes also show NSW Health had already chosen redeveloping the existing site as its preferred option.
“NSW has previously indicated it does not support a new hospital in Albury,” the notes read. “The NSW Government and the Australian Government have already made significant investments in infrastructure improvements to Albury Hospital, the benefits of which would not be realised if a new hospital was pursued.”
Community anger has been further stoked by revelations in the draft master plan that Albury Wodonga Health had not acted on internal warnings, dating back to 2016, that major engineering works were needed to prevent the potential collapse of Albury Base hospital’s second medical ward. In a recent statement, Albury Wodonga Health says it “reassures staff, patients, and the community that Albury Hospital Campus Medical Ward 2 is safe to occupy”.
Cohn, a former Albury deputy mayor who served on rotation as a junior doctor at Albury Base hospital, says the Covid pandemic reinforced the local perception that state governments are out of touch with the region’s needs.
“During Covid, we had intensive care doctors trying to construct extra ventilators out of stuff they bought at Bunnings,” she says. “The state border between our two hospitals was closed. The on-call paediatrician is usually based in Albury, so if a sick child presented in Wodonga, the on-call paediatrician would be held up by border control. It’s sheer luck that nobody died because of the border closure.”
Cohn says the decision to go against stakeholder advice on the hospital redevelopment would mean “the anger in this community is just going to keep building”.
“The local joke is that ‘NSW’ stands for ‘Nothing South of Wagga’,” she says. “Albury Wodonga is one large connected regional community, and we’re the main service centre for a wide region of smaller towns. But state governments treat us like we’re two separate small towns right on the edges of their maps.”
Health Infrastructure NSW says the 2021 master plan process “did not fully consider matters relating to detailed cost, value for money and affordability”.
“It was considered these key issues would be addressed through future economic evaluation, the business case process, and the funding submission,” they say, adding that the $558m redevelopment will deliver a new multi-storey clinical services building and more beds through expanded clinical and non-clinical services.
