Thursday, 2 May 2024

Albury Wodonga Health

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (18:57): (868) My adjournment is for the Minister for Health. As reported in the Border Mail last week, a lack of local dialysis services has led to kidney patients in the Albury–Wodonga border region choosing to die rather than wait for dialysis. A top renal specialist, Dr Russell Auwardt, speaking to the Border Mail last week, said his new patients were simply added to the waiting list. If the cases are urgent, there is the potential to seek treatment in Wangaratta, which faces similar challenges, and the next stop is Melbourne. He said that the cost and stress of travel to Wangaratta or Melbourne meant further treatment was often abandoned. People are choosing not to have dialysis and are just letting nature take its course, he said. The limitations of dialysis treatment on the border are well known. At present Albury Wodonga Health’s under-resourced dialysis unit is at capacity every day. There are only nine dialysis chairs at the Wodonga campus of Albury Wodonga Health. Patients in acute and subacute care at the Albury campus must be transported across the Murray for dialysis. The dialysis unit has extended its workday and still cannot meet existing demand.

In 2021 a master plan for the future of health services – one which this Labor government refused to release publicly – forecast that the number of chairs would need to triple by 2040. That was based on a clinical services plan prepared in consultation with medical practitioners, which also took into account demographics and an ageing population. Earlier this year – and cynically, on the day preceding a local rally on the need for a new hospital to be built on a greenfield site – the latest master plan was released. It committed to a 10-storey tower that adds eight extra dialysis chairs by 2032, making it 17 in total, as part of an election commitment on a land-limited Albury hospital.

The 300,000 people in this Victorian hospital’s catchment want to know what the government is going to do about the current crisis as well as future needs. The action I seek is for the minister to listen to the renal specialists such as Dr Russell Auwardt and provide the number of dialysis chairs that will be available to renal patients as part of the $450 million Albury Wodonga Health tower.