When I came to Albury-Wodonga as a general surgeon 20 years ago, I found a medical and surgical community that was providing a service equivalent to that in most Melbourne and Sydney hospitals.
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The exceptions were neurosurgery and cardiothoracic surgery.
There were seven public operating theatres (two at the Mercy, three at Albury Base and two at Wodonga) and about 350 public hospital beds at the three sites.
There were three private hospital theatres and about 60 private beds.
The population was about 70,000.
Twenty years on, there are only six public operating theatres and about 300 public hospital beds.
There are 12 private operating theatres and about 160 private beds.
The population is almost 100,000.
We have had a continual battle to maintain the standard and scope of surgical and medical practice in our hospitals and have steadily fallen behind the major Melbourne and Sydney hospitals.
More importantly, we have fallen behind hospitals and health services such as Geelong, Wollongong and Newcastle that were our peers in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
We have lost the ability to perform vascular surgery locally and struggle to maintain our physician services.
New services, particularly in oncology, have
been developed almost
exclusively due to the efforts of private practitioners and providers and
have failed to receive significant backing from government.
We are now approaching a crisis that will be blamed on the formation of Albury-Wodonga Health but is really the result of chronic under-investment and neglect by federal and state governments of all persuasions.
No amount of time and effort recruiting new doctors to the area is going to be of benefit if we cannot provide the necessary public infrastructure to allow them to practise the standard of medicine that they and the people of Albury-Wodonga have every right to expect.
Albury-Wodonga is a rapidly growing regional centre and probably the largest inland population centre in Australia.
It has been blighted by the Border and state rivalries for far too long.
We need enough money to open all the beds and operating theatres at Albury.
This should include the high-dependency unit and fourth operating theatre that have stood idle since the new base hospital was built.
We need to be able to expand our in-patient facilities to cater for the increased workload and population.
Even this would only bring us back to parity with what was available in the early 1990s.
In short, we need to be taken seriously as a health service.
Albury-Wodonga Health gives the Victorian and NSW governments and the federal government an ideal opportunity to show what progress can be made when there is a co-operative and far-seeing association.
It also has the potential to show what a disaster interstate rivalries can produce.
Neil F. Bright is in private practice in Albury-Wodonga as a breast, endocrine and gastrointestinal surgeon. He is also director of surgery for Albury-Wodonga Health.
