Figures provided to the Otago Daily Times showed Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora (HNZ) last year spent $3.52m on maintenance at Dunedin Hospital, including carpentry, fitting, plumbing, electrical and outsourced work — a 32% increase over 2023 and more than double what was spent in an average year since 2016.
New Zealand Nurses Organisation president Anne Daniels said the figures did not surprise her.
"What worries me is this government keeps telling us that they're hell-bent on saving costs and I'm frankly surprised that it has only increased overall three times from 2020.
"This maintenance cost is what has been done. It's not what has been deferred."
On January 31, Health Minister Simeon Brown announced a new hospital would be built at the former Cadbury’s site at a cost of $1.88 billion, rejecting the previously raised option of retrofitting the existing hospital.
Ms Daniels said she was worried about the fact there did not seem to be any plan to keep the present Dunedin Hospital active for the next six years.
"In the past year or so, the theatre service has had 500 reported incidents, and that doesn't include the unreported ones, of failures in the system, which of course is costing everybody.
"I'm really, really concerned that we've got another six years to wait."
Ms Daniels said staff who work in the building were constantly having to do workarounds. "That's only going to get worse over the next few years."
Over the past few months, the ODT has reported on a range of problems at Dunedin Hospital.
All this has been happening while HNZ figures out how to keep the building up to standard.
In 2020, the government approved a separate ongoing $23.6m critical infrastructure works programme called "keeping the lights on" to ensure the wider Dunedin Hospital campus remained safe and functioning until the new hospital was opened.
As of December 2024, HNZ had only spent $6.2m of that allocated funding.
Before Mr Brown’s announcement, the ODT approached HNZ about its project to "keep the lights on" at the existing hospital.
HNZ Te Waipounamu regional head of infrastructure Dr Rob Ojala said work on the programme had been paused while HNZ awaited a decision on the preferred option for the new hospital.
