Councils are being urged to assist with housing and childcare to cater for an estimated 750 new staff to be employed in the wake of the Albury hospital redevelopment.
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The extent of fresh workers and related impacts have been outlined by Albury Wodonga Health's chairman Jonathon Green and chief executive Bill Appleby in an interview with The Border Mail.
"When we open the new clinical services building in 2027-28 we're going to need 550 additional EFT (employed full time)," Mr Appleby said.
"Now that's a mix between nursing personnel, medical, allied health as well as all those support people, wards people, administrators, so it's a mix of people but largely clinicians.
"When you look at our workforce profile, 3200 staff, many of our staff, particularly our nurses, are part-time workers and we've been working hard trying to elevate that, so if you extrapolate that out there's probably about 750 new staff, because they're not all going to work full-time."
Mr Green said a wide-ranging approach was needed to assist in meeting that worker increase.
"We would really call on local councils and any other interested community group to really turn our minds to a joint approach to attract people to our region, increase housing numbers, access to childcare, which is a huge barrier for us with a very significant proportion of our workforce being mothers and fathers of young kids who can't get childcare," Mr Green said.
"We need a really co-ordinated regional approach to actually staff this greenfield or brownfield."
Mr Appleby said he wanted land at Albury and Wodonga hospitals designated for lease to a private childcare operator, however that requires approval by the relevant state governments.
On the issue of a Border hospital being on a new site or expanded at Albury, Mr Appleby said the matter was "done and dusted" despite ongoing efforts by Wodonga Council and lobby group Better Border Health to have a greenfields development.
As to Wodonga Council's planned health summit, the chair and chief executive now say Albury Wodonga Health will be there after having said last week they were evaluating what role they would have and calling for more information.
"We just need to understand what is the objective, what would we like to achieve out of this health summit?" Mr Appleby said.
"We're going to get a lot of very important people into the room, policymakers, politicians, practitioners like ourselves, we just need to make sure it is a really good investment of time, so we get some really clear deliverables."
Asked if he was concerned about how the summit may play out given Wodonga Council is campaigning for a greenfields site, Mr Appleby said "passion's good, it's a sign of a great democracy".
"For every person who thinks we need a greenfields site, there's another person who says 'get on with the job and deliver the hospital, we need those beds yesterday'," he said.
"I don't think we're concerned at all, having diversity of opinion in the community I think that's good....so there is no hesitancy on our part to be engaging with Wodonga City Council.
"In actual fact I would describe our relationship with the mayor and CEO to be extremely healthy."
On the question of how many beds will be part of the Albury hospital upgrade, Mr Appleby said the public release of that was a matter for state health departments.
However, he said NSW Health Infrastructure would be releasing details of ICU beds, theatre numbers, day surgery beds and new inpatient units in the new year.
