Box Hill Hospital: Government failure to fund main redevelopment

Hansard: 22 May 2007 ASSEMBLY

Mr CLARK (Box Hill) — I raise with the Minister for Health the government’s failure to provide funding in the state budget for the commencement of the main part of the long-awaited redevelopment of the Box Hill Hospital. I ask the minister to make clear to the community and to the hospital whether or not the government is still committed to proceeding with the redevelopment and to give a clear commitment to fund the redevelopment so that it can proceed without further delay.

Box Hill Hospital and the residents of the Box Hill electorate and beyond have already suffered badly from the government’s delays over this much-needed project. The current Box Hill Hospital was built largely in the 1950s with funds raised by the hard work of the local community.

Those facilities have served the community well, but they are now badly showing their age and are suffering from the steadily rising needs of the ageing part of the population and from a growing number of young families. That is starkly illustrated by the latest wait list figures for the hospital. I quote from a report in the Whitehorse Leader newspaper of 8 May under the heading ‘Hospital in wait list emergency’:

Patients are waiting longer for treatment and ambulances are increasingly being turned away by the Box Hill Hospital emergency department.
And the number of semi and non-urgent patients on elective surgery waiting lists at the hospital has increased substantially.
These findings from the Your Hospitals state government report released last Friday come days after Premier Steve Bracks overlooked any funding in his budget for the second stage of the Box Hill Hospital redevelopment.
The history of this matter goes back some time. In 2002 the hospital put a lot of effort into developing for the government detailed plans for a major redevelopment. Those plans were submitted to the government but were rejected. Instead the government gave the hospital a series of grants to go through the whole master planning exercise again. The hospital has now come up with a revised master plan, which went to the government.

In last year’s budget, the government committed to providing $38.2 million for the preliminary first stage of the redevelopment, which is the construction of a car park, an administration block and other facilities off the main site in order to free up space for the main redevelopment.

Construction of this preliminary work is now under way and is scheduled to be completed in mid-2008. Thus the hospital needs answers now about whether the next stage is to proceed rather than being forced to wait until next year’s budget, which would cause further delays and increased costs.

In the run-up to last year’s election the government led everyone to believe it was committed to the full redevelopment. Thus staff and the community were devastated by the government’s failure to commit to it in this year’s budget. That was added to by the reported remarks of a government spokesman in the local paper that further stages for the Box Hill Hospital’s redevelopment ‘would be considered’ in future budgets. The community has already suffered badly enough through the Bracks government’s procrastination. I ask the minister to get on with getting this redevelopment undertaken.