Wodonga GP Lachlan McKeeman said these impacts included patients being discharged from emergency or sent to Melbourne because there were no beds available or the demand was too great.

"Parents have taken it upon themselves to drive a child to hospital from outside of town, from Tangambalanga, to ED, knowing that they're taking a risk, but they're (also) taking a risk by waiting for an ambulance," he said.

"It causes a flow-on effect to all presentations, nursing home, GP, emergency surgery presentations.

"Trying to transfer a patient to hospital from a nursing home over the weekend, it can't happen because there's no beds, ED's too busy, there's staff shortages.

"When the health system is so overworked and so overwhelmed with patient demand ... no matter who you put in there it's really hard for it to provide the care that it needs to for community.

"It's a recurring issue that just isn't going anywhere and it's reaching a point where it's a crisis."

Dr McKeeman and fellow Border doctors Glenn Singleman, Daniel Chubb and Barbara Robertson joined Indi MP Helen Haines in calling for all levels of government to work together to build a new single site hospital on the Border.

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Dr Chubb, a surgeon, said the current plans to upgrade the Albury hospital emergency department were not enough.

"That's like saying I'm going to make my fuel tank bigger to make my car go faster, it's nonsense, it doesn't work like that," he said.

"You actually need to increase all areas of the hospital to make it able to handle more patients."

He pointed out trying to run two hospitals - one in Wodonga, one in Albury - would cause duplication and make it harder to introduce more specialised medical work that required larger wards.

"You're going to want a bigger hospital that's in one place, not two smaller hospitals in two different places because you simply won't be able to run that kind of service across two hospitals," he said.

Dr Singleman said the Albury and Wodonga emergency departments saw about 70,000 people a year but had fewer than 40 beds, leaving patients in settings "less than ideal".

"They've got to wait inside the ambulance, they've got to wait inside the waiting room, they've even got to wait inside our emergency department because there's no beds in the hospital for them to go to," he said.

"It's frustrating for everybody, we need more real estate."

Having come to the Border in recent years from Sydney, Dr Singleman said Albury-Wodonga facilities are "second rate compared to what you get in a big city".

"The staff are fantastic, we've got great doctors, great nurses, great nurse practitioners, everybody in the hospital system here is a real team player ... but we just don't have the beds," he said.

Dr Robertson, who is chair of Border Medical Association, said the situation made it difficult to retain and recruit medical staff.

"Surgeons are really frustrated, they've got very big waiting lists and they're growing and we can't get their cases done because we have no capacity," she said.

"So that frustration eventually will lead to people leaking out of our system."

Areas like robotic surgery needed bigger theatres and appropriate patient care.

"So we can't look people in the eye and say, 'Yeah, come up here and start the new specialty, whatever that is, we've got beds' because that's not true," she said.

"We're repeatedly cancelling lists over and over and our waiting lists are growing."

Dr Haines called on the next federal government to contribute $300 million, about a third of the total cost, to a new Albury-Wodonga hospital, noting $128 million went to Shellharbour hospital during the last federal election campaign.

"It's just a furphy to say that the federal government doesn't play in this space, they do," she said.

"We want to see a commitment from whoever forms government.

"It's the single most important issue on the Border."

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