The new public emergency department in Albury is inadequate for the Twin Cities and shows the need for a fresh hospital, the Border Medical Association's secretary says.
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Doctor Phillip Steele was commenting ahead of a community rally being held on Sunday, July 7, in Wodonga, where he will be among the speakers pushing for a pause on the plan to upgrade Albury hospital rather than build a new medical base.
"The new emergency department is a way better place to work in for people that work there, the rooms are larger, the equipment is great, the set-up is good, but it's still too small for this region," Dr Steele said.
"It does not have the capacity to manage emergency presentations of Albury and Wodonga and the region, so it's unable to fulfil that single-site need and its work is frustrated by the inability of the staff to admit patients to the ward because there's not enough beds to put them in.
Advanced life support paramedic Sam Burbidge, who will also speak at the rally, said while there was a "nice, new ED" ambulances were continuing to ramp.
"What happens is the nurses and doctors do a wonderful job there in ED and get the patient stabilised, but then they need to be admitted to a ward bed and if there's no beds in the ward, that patient is stuck in the emergency department and then obviously if there are no beds in the emergency department the ambulance patients are stuck on stretchers," Ms Burbidge said.
"The problem comes from a lot of the time not having the capacity on the wards, which is why I think the current Albury hospital plan needs an urgent pause and rethink to make sure we're going to have that capacity in the hospital to actually accommodate the health care needs of this community."
Better Border Health is organising the rally, which is the first it has staged since May 2022 when it called the community together on Wodonga's Lincoln Causeway to push for a new hospital before the Albury upgrade was announced in October that year.
Group representative Michelle Cowan said the need for an entirely new Twin Cities hospital would be made clear at Sunday's event at The Cube in Wodonga.
"We'll have our trusted local doctors, our medical health team there really to say 'not good enough'," Ms Cowan said.
"(Attendees) won't leave the venue without feeling we need a new hospital on a new site, I'm convinced of that."
Politicians Helen Haines, Sussan Ley, Bill Tilley and Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell will attend, Ms Cowan said, but Albury MP Justin Clancy is an apology and the Victorian and NSW Health ministers, Mary-Anne Thomas and Ryan Park, rebuffed invitations.
"They both had previous engagements, which is disappointing," Ms Cowan said.
"This is the voice they need to be listening to, the voice of the clinicians, the voice of the community."
Tickets for the event have nearly been all taken up with a crowd of around 250 expected.
It is unclear if there will be a live stream, as the Better Border Health Facebook page was hacked this week.
Retired Wodonga paramedic Mike Fuery has endorsed the forum.
"I see and hear from my paramedic colleagues that things are just getting worse as the days go on, despite the new (ED) building," Mr Fuery said.
"When the problem is a bottleneck you don't solve it by building a bigger bottleneck, so that is effectively what has happened because ramping continues."
Ms Burbidge said she had done up to 16-hour shifts and was seeing ambulances from Beechworth, Chiltern and Tallangatta regularly attending jobs in Wodonga.
"There was a patient in Wodonga recently who had a fall and ended up waiting on the footpath for over an hour for an ambulance to come, just because there weren't any available," she said.
"There were a lot of us ramped at hospitals and it's becoming more commonplace in Wodonga now, we're frequently responding across to Albury because the NSW ambulance crews are all stuck at hospital as well."
