New hospital likely to be of similar size

The new Dunedin Hospital is likely to be a similar size to the current building, SDHB Commissioner Richard Thomson says.

Responding to a question at yesterday’s primary and community care strategy meeting, Mr Thomson said the building was not going to be "two M*A*S*H tents in the middle of Logan Park".

"The hospital will not be smaller than it is now, we already know that," Mr Thomson said.

"It will probably be a similar physical size, but more efficient."

However, the new hospital could not be a duplicate of the current building in terms of services provided, he said.

"If we simply continue to do things exactly as we are doing them, then the new hospital is going to need to be 30-40 percent larger and that will impact on the amount of care we are going to be able to provide.

"The bigger a hospital becomes, the more it costs to run, the more it costs to build, the more it costs to maintain. It’s a balancing act, and one of the biggest challenges with the design will be getting that balance right.

"If we don’t start thinking at this part of the process about the kinds of changes we can make to take some of that demand out of the hospital and into other places, or prevent it coming to the hospital in the first place, then the cost will be a great deal bigger."

SDHB chief executive Chris Fleming said the rebuild was a "once in a generation" opportunity to make sure the right health services were in the right places.

Because some services had historically been at Dunedin or were still there because of the "squeaky wheel" effect, the rebuild meant service placement could be reconsidered, he said.

"We can now influence future secondary services and also how we prioritise our investment in primary and community services."