In endorsing Albury Wodonga Health's clinical services plan, the 12-member executive committee of the Border Medical Association laid bare in a letter the pressures they work under.

"We cannot continue to sit by and watch patients and families suffer as this region is forced to make do with two outdated and undersized hospitals," they said.

"On a daily basis, staff at Albury Wodonga Health remain under severe pressure to maintain the safety of our vast community.

"Doctors are torn between the campuses, trying to prioritise where they are needed most, and leaving others behind.

"Albury Wodonga Health's infrastructure has lagged behind other regional centres, limiting the ability to develop new capabilities and to recruit specialists."

Their stance is reflected by the 150-page clinical services plan.

It notes as Wodonga is not accredited as a training site for the Australian College of Emergency Medicine, it is difficult to provide the same level of staffing at both campuses, resulting in a "two-tiered system with potentially varied quality of care between Albury and Wodonga EDs".

There were 38,687 presentations to Albury ED and 27,823 to Wodonga ED in 2019; of those patients, 46 per cent and 31 per cent respectively were time-sensitive cases.

More transfers are made from Wodonga to Albury than from Albury to other hospitals, largely because a specialty was not available south of the border.

There is a lack of inpatient capacity at both campuses and the strain is clear in the delays experienced by mental health patients.

Between 2015 and 2019, mental health diagnoses in ED increased by 10 per cent and the average length of stay for those patients at Albury has increased a massive 94 per cent, to 9.1 hours.

The average time between admission and first seeing a doctor overall has also been increasing at both campuses, sitting at an hour for category four patients.

Further, different data systems at each campus creates "administrative burdens that can disrupt or negatively impact patient care" and not having easy access to on-site imaging and pathology overnight is another complication.

Thus, the CSP has recommended:

The Border Medical Association argues this strain proves that despite concerns about the future of either campus, the community must "join us in advocating for a single hospital".

"We are grateful that Albury Wodonga Health has consulted with clinicians and taken heed of our concerns, and we fully support the aim of the Clinical Services Plan to create a new single-site hospital.

"The reality is that we need a completely new hospital - either at a current site or a new one."

Former midwife and Indi MP Helen Haines said stakeholders and residents will need to approach master-planning - the next step to determine infrastructure needs - with "an open mind".

"The most important thing here is that we leave our opinions at the door when it comes to the master plan and let the master planning process work this out," she said.

"Seeing the data that our population growth is going to be increasing by one third, and of that expansion, 80 per cent of those people will be older people, we know that demand on our services is going to be growing so rapidly.

"This is the busiest regional health service outside of Geelong ... and our facilities are nowhere near up to what we need.

"I'm very pleased that there is a unified clinical services plan that sets up for us what we need.

"And the next step is the master plan to tell us how we're going to do it."

Dr Haines agreed with the Border Medical Association that minimising the need to fly doctors in, and patients out, was a crucial goal of the clinical services plan.

"We need new neonatal intensive care facilities so that little babies that are either born prematurely or sick don't have to be flown out," she said.

"We need to have high quality maternity services, and we need to be able to offer things like interventional cardiology that our older population often need and have to leave our community in order to receive.

"They are equally important services, and we should be offering them on the Border.

"We are a big enough population to have those services right here."

The kind of emergency intervention for heart attack and stroke victims that AWH is close to making a reality locally would have prevented Tim Farrah being flown to Melbourne in 2017.

"I was incredibly lucky that with my heart attack, I was able to get to Melbourne just in time, otherwise my funeral would have been four years ago," he said.

"The cath lab that was built a couple of years ago is in the process of being commissioned, for want of a better word, to do emergency work.

"This will mean that lots of people will not have to suffer losing their loved ones, because we don't have an emergency cardiac service here."

Mr Farrah resigned from the Albury Wodonga Health board recently but was on the steering committee for the CSP.

"I think it's a huge step forward for the whole community to finally have this piece of work done ... and for it to be approved by both state governments, who were involved in getting the plan created," he said.

"If you had a magic wand, you would have liked to have had it five, six years ago.

"But we've got it now, and it's great the board can pursue that agenda on behalf of everybody."

Mr Farrah said "we can't jump the gun and make assumptions" about the location of the single-site hospital.

"The question as to what that needs to look like hasn't been answered yet and that's the next part, in doing the master plan," he said.

"But the good news is the NSW government is funding that master plan, it's going to be done - so we will have the answer that question really soon."

How long the master plan would take was a key question Dr Haines had for the AWH executive and board when meeting with them on Monday.

'We can't wait too long for this to get going," she said.

"The other question I had for the board was, how will they engage with the local community.

"It's so important that we hear the voices of the residents of the Border region."

The master plan is expected to be completed in September or October, with upgrades of the Albury and Wodonga campuses to progress as planned.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Dr Haines said AWH boss Michael Kalimnios had updated her on a $12.5 million project announced by the federal Health Minister Greg Hunt in the lead-up to the election.

"I called on Greg Hunt to bring forward funding, he brought forward $2.5 million so that was delivered," she said.

"The rest of that money and the project will be underway by 2022.

"So that will go ahead, irrespective, and that doesn't impinge on this call, which is really for a whole new hospital.

"This is going to require the three governments working together to bring us up to standard."