WODONGA’S hospital faces a limited long-term future and could need a total rebuild within the next 10 to 15 years.
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That is the expectation of Stuart Spring, Albury Wodonga Health’s boss of the past five years, who retired yesterday.
Dr Spring said the days of the service having two campuses — the cities’ two hospitals — were rapidly becoming an anachronism as health service delivery became more sophisticated.
The current approach, he said, “won’t be the final solution”.
“Ultimately there’s going to have to be a single site (for Albury Wodonga Health) that’s equally distant between the extremes of both populations,” he said.
Dr Spring said Wodonga hospital was hampered by its “suburban environment”.
“It’s of lightweight construction and some of it is over 65 years old.”
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Dr Spring said he believed government shared that view.
“But it’s a matter of where it is on the to-do list. And when you start to rebuild Wodonga hospital then you have to say this is the hospital of the future,” he said.
“It would become the region’s acute hospital, because Albury’s already 20 years old.
“In Sydney they’re rebuilding hospitals that are only 40 years old, such as the Royal North Shore Hospital.
Dr Spring emphasised though that such considerations were a vision, “not planning”.
But this vision had the backing of the Albury Wodonga Health board.
“Anybody intimately connected with the health system — whether they be board or management or clinicians of all varieties — know you’ve got to have critical mass,” he said.
“We’ve gone a long way by running the two hospitals as one, but there are duplications that can only be avoided by a single site.
“You reach a point where you can only go up, but you can’t do that at either site.”
Dr Spring said Albury Wodonga Health now had strong support from the two state governments.
Negotiations now under way are looking at shoring up an inter-government agreement guaranteeing the service’s future to 2035.
“That basically says there is no way back and the future is together,” Dr Spring said.