ABOUT 3500 letters of support for a redevelopment of Inverell District Hospital will land on the Minster for Health, Jillian Skinner’s desk about 11.30am Thursday, when she meets with the Member for Northern Tablelands, Adam Marshall.
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The individual letters call for an overhaul of Inverell hospital’s operating theatres, acute care, maternity and paediatric services as well as the renal dialysis unit, and they emphasise the need for more health services minus the travel.
The redevelopment will cost about $30 million.
The letters were collected by Mr Marshall this afternoon at the Inverell branch of New England Mutual, which was responsible for collecting 2590 of the signatures.
It is an achievement that branch manager Alex Ribeiro was very proud of.
“I’m pretty excited about the idea and I’m overwhelmed and amazed to see how the public of Inverell has responded to this form,” Mr Ribeiro said.
I’m pretty excited about the idea and I’m overwhelmed and amazed to see how the public of Inverell has responded to this form
- Alex Ribeiro, New England Mutual branch manager
“It is certainly important to everybody, and everyone who signed these letters has had a story.
“I’m ever so thankful to our staff. They have worked so hard with all the businesses and members and non-members within the community. They’ve been handing out forms left right and centre and this is the result.”
One staff member who worked behind the scenes was development officer Craig Horner who said it was a great branch effort by all the staff.
“I guess the worst thing for us is that if we had had a few more weeks we could have doubled the number, or even tripled it,” he said.
While in Inverell on Wednesday, Mr Marshall said he was very pleased with the number of signatures and thanked the community for their support in such a critical project.
“To be able to go down to Sydney tomorrow and be able to dump these on the Minister’s desk has such a powerful effect, to be able to say, bang, ‘This is what collectively the Inverell community think, and how strongly they feel about it’,” Mr Marshall said.
“I think we’ve got a strong case for getting the funding, however, it is a very competitive process.”
Mr Marshall said he was looking for the funding to come from the Health Capital Works budget.
“If we’re successful in gaining funding then a portion of that will have to be used to do detailed planning (a clinical services plan) to get the plans to the stage where we’ve got documents that are ready to go out for tender,” Mr Marshall said.