11:00am

The government has put out a multi-billion dollar plan for rebuilding
hospitals it says are so run down patient care is being affected.


The long-delayed plan was released on Wednesday, five years after the first national stocktake of health facilities found they needed over $20 billion of investment - a figure repeated by the government on Wednesday.


The Health Minister Simeon Brown said the system was "under significant pressure from ageing infrastructure".


"This is a first for New Zealand - a single, long-term plan that lays out a clear pipeline for health infrastructure," he said in a statement.


Successive governments have lamented this has not happened, with affects over the years such as surgeons in Palmerston North hitting their heads on lights
in cramped theatres, Hawke's Bay's main hospital having to hand out iceblocks to staff because the aircon did not work, and pregnant women having to rely
on an earthquake-prone building at Middelmore Hospital in Auckland that was uneconomic to fix.


"We need to balance the degraded state of infrastructure with growing demand
to implement new and more efficient means of service deliver," said the
19-page plan released on Wednesday.


The public health system has almost 1300 building aged on average almost 50 years old, across 86 hospital and other campuses - 31 of them are earthquake-prone (the riskiest seismic category) yet are meant to be able to function immediately after a disaster.


Brown said the plan "introduces a more efficient way of delivering large hospital projects" - he had earlier named it Building Hospitals Better.


"Instead of building single, large-scale structures, the plan proposes a
staged approach - delivering smaller, more manageable facilities in phases


It is the latest in a series of overhauls of Health NZ infrastructure
delivery that have delivered patchy results. While HNZ has built hundreds of projects, often they have been over time and over budget, and based on inaccurate business cases, exemplified in Dunedin hospital's blowouts.


The plan, delayed amid ructions over funding and staffing at Health New
Zealand Te Whatu Ora, aims to upgrade buildings based on population growth
and need and service delivery networks. Northland and Tairawhiti are listed
as "priority" service delivery regions.


The plan envisages three to four stages of upgrades including some big new builds and expansions of acute services such as operating theatres, inpatient units, and expanded emergency departments.


Services such as radiology, oncology, dialysis, and day-stay surgeries would
be built in hubs closer to population centres, the plan showed.


Each project in the pipeline would need a business case and Cabinet signoff.


"While the infrastructure deficit will take time to address, this plan is a critical step forward," Brown said.


At the same time, the government said it was going looking for a builder of
the foundations of the inpatient building at the new Dunedin Hospital.


The beleaguered project's costs leapt to $1.8 billion last year and the government looked at a redesign before deciding to press on, amid public protests.


The government said a tender would go out soon for the foundations, and the capping of the piles would start mid year.

Meanwhile, talks go on about the major part of the construction and design of the outpatients continues.


rnz.co.nz

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