Community group Better Border Health to hold rally and start petition for new Albury-Wodonga hospital

The organisation will host a rally on Gateway Island from 11am Sunday week, where the petition will be launched and those with stories of hardship with the existing Twin Cities hospitals will be invited to speak.

Better Border Health's Di Thomas publicly launched the apolitical group on Thursday flanked by fellow committee members Andrew Boyd Barber and Michael Gobel.

"The aim of the rally is to get the community involved in this and to have them understand that this is an issue that is vital to every single person who lives in our community and not just Albury-Wodonga," Ms Thomas said.

"The development of a new regional hospital is imperative in servicing those communities around us on both sides of the border."

The past Border Mail editor said the success of community campaigns to secure a cancer centre and headspace site for youth mental health services showed what could be achieved by a unified approach.

Politicians will be invited to watch the rally and a petition for federal parliament will be started at the event.

"Five thousand signatures doesn't seem out of the question as far as I'm concerned," Ms Thomas said when asked how many she hoped would be party to a petition.

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Border medical heavyweights David Clancy and Craig Underhill joined Ms Thomas on Thursday and endorsed the rally.

Dr Clancy, the deputy chair of the Border Medical Association, said it was important the community stood up alongside health workers who have stressed the need for a new hospital.

"The reality is that we need all voices being raised to the governments to hear what we need," Dr Clancy said.

"When you're looking at Spring Street or you're looking at Macquarie Street or if you're looking at Canberra the reality is it's our people, it's our community, that need to come together to help drive this.

"We have been trying as clinicians to raise the voice and we have had incremental improvement in terms of what we're seeing from governments in terms of the language, but the reality is is that we are dealing with a situation which requires three levels of government to come together.

"That creates its complications and that's where we really need our community to try and drive this forward."

Professor Underhill, who is Albury Wodonga Health's director of cancer services, said the oncology centre had proven the long-term value of a campaign for better health services.

"We were amongst the worst in the state for cancer outcomes and now we're amongst the best, so we're actually equal with metro," Professor Underhill said.

However, he said the lack of an adequate hospital was detrimental to cancer patients being treated in the adjoining centre at East Albury.

"Our cancer services are now constrained by not what's in the cancer centre, but what's at Albury Wodonga Health - a lack of surgical capacity, the ability to do some surgical sub-specialities, the lack of some medical specialties ," Professor Underhill said.

"There's just not enough space and so we can't get our patients in through ED, they spend hours in ED."

Patients can share their experiences with Better Border Health via the group's presences on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

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