Plan to lock away some land fits the bill for Border hospital

The jungle drums are beating that something's brewing with the DIY job at Albury hospital.

The question is what?

Will it be the much discussed and eternally secret master plan to be released publicly?

Or will just be another round of message massaging - a con dressed up as consultation?

The community wants a new hospital, they should have heard us 12 months ago and perhaps they could still press pause on this now.

I'm still fighting, as are many others, but if they won't accept the community doesn't want the $450 million Band-Aid, with all its shortfalls, then the question is how do we shore up our health future?

Not the future dictated by an election cycle but one that locks in a plan for next 50 years and perhaps beyond even that.

I have an idea.

Ahead of Victoria's election last November I was able to convince the Coalition that we needed a new hospital on a greenfield site.

I still think that was the gold medal standard.

We had earmarked some land next to Bandiana Link.

Close to the freeway, not far from the airport, centrally located, able to be quarantined in a Border lockdown and, importantly, flat.

We lost the election and Labor had backed in its tower at Albury Base.

But that land on the Link Road is still there - still available.

Why not buy it, landbank it, lock it away before it's lost.

It could be the future centre for those sub-acute arms of Albury Wodonga Health that have been promised to this side of the Border - a home for the missing but much needed palliative care beds, adolescent acute mental health beds and so much more.

It could be a private/public investment.

It could also provide enough vacant land for a future hospital, one that finally replaces the flotsam and jetsam of a land-locked Albury hospital.

The land won't be cheap, the investment substantial, but there is a potential offset with Wodonga hospital in Vermont Street.

It too is landlocked.

It too is tired, parking a nightmare.

But that land is valuable, developable and in the centre of the city.

You would have to think it could attract a sizeable sum, that it could be at least seed funding to the Bandiana Link development.

I believe that block could deliver a health precinct with enough surplus land not for just one hospital, but for the regeneration of yet another hospital in half a century's time.

In the US, hospital towers reach the end of their useful life and a new one is built next door as part of a planned obsolescence.

When it's done and dusted, they return to the first site.

But back to the drums and if sometime next week we finally get to see the master plan, we must appreciate that it's a working document, part of the planning process.

That's not to downplay the lack of transparency in all of this - the Victorian government released the master plans for the Royal Melbourne, the new Footscray hospital and Bendigo, so it was always curious that as far back as March 2021 the then health minister Martin Foley declared it would not be released publicly.

There is, according to NSW government records, a published master plan from October 2021 and so the real test would be to see what's different, what's changed.

If this $450 million tower simply regurgitates the status quo with the same number of beds, similar or less floor space and the same limitations on services - then why do it, what's the point?

The master plan is one thing, but I still have serious reservations about the here and now.

For the best part of two weeks now non-urgent surgery has been on hold because there are simply not enough hospital beds for patients.

That's not acceptable when the elective surgery waiting list sits at more than 3500 patients, people waiting three years for knee replacements if they're lucky.

We need a bed solution now.

If it's not the overflow, demountable units requested more than 12 months ago by Albury Wodonga Health, then maybe it's making better use of our hospital resources, accepting that the Mercy in Albury might work even without modern fire sprinklers or perhaps our regional hospitals like Tallangatta could offer a solution.

As the old saying goes and as we on the Border have learnt ... "you've got nothing if you don't have your health".