Our community hospital – which formerly offered 24/7 emergency care, maternity services, and routine surgeries – has been reduced to a part-time triage outpost. After 5:30pm it offers nothing at all. The wards and equipment (including a modern palliative care wing) sit idle, even as people suffer without local care. No doctor walks its halls. This decline in service delivery is unacceptable to our community. We are angry and frustrated at having a once-functional hospital “temporarily” downgraded for nearly two years.
– Save Wee Waa Hospital Committee

Community needs are not being met. Despite having three local doctors and a stable population, the hospital is underutilised due to administrative decisions, not a lack of demand. Demand appears to have shifted onto Narrabri Hospital, not disappeared.
– Peter Carrett

It is approaching two years since Wee Waa Hospital has offered emergency care outside of “business hours”. As an organisation working with disadvantaged and vulnerable young people, we believe that this is unacceptable and find it difficult to find any coherent logic behind the continued lack of action to rectify this. Our next closest hospital, with an emergency department open beyond 6pm, is at least a 29 minute drive away, if the emergency requiring attention occurs in town. Communities further west of Wee Waa but serviced by Wee Waa Hospital, such as Pilliga, already have a distance of 50km to travel to an emergency department, and so, after 6pm, now have an hour to travel before they reach emergency care.
– RiverBank Youth Works

On HNELHD’s watch, Wee Waa Hospital has slipped from a full-functioning 24hr hospital to an almost empty building, without VMOs or inpatients, its only function apart from a community health presence being to provide a daily ED presence from 8am to 5.30pm, usually with the support of just telehealth or MyED doctors. This is a crisis for our community and the surrounding area.
– Sonia Fogarty

Having minimal or no health services nearby mean rural people in the Wee Waa area have reduced health services and are not given the same access as every other NSW resident.
– Wee Waa Hospital Auxiliary

Currently health services in our area, North West NSW, are declining and it is believed that not enough funding is being spent on our health services. Narrabri and Wee Waa deserve better. Our contribution to GDP is significant and yet many people are moving away and not wanting to live in our area due to poor health services. Country people deserve the same health treatment as those that live in more urban areas.
– Kat Denniss

I now suffer the pain at home rather than go to the Wee Waa Hospital because firstly if it is during the night, it is closed and during the day they have no doctor to see me anyway.
– Name withheld

As a resident in rural and remote NSW, when we should be experiencing growth and advances in medical treatment in the name of progress, it has become evidently clear that in living west of the ranges means to experience medical disadvantage.
– Diana Burtenshaw

There are number of incidents where people have been transported to Narrabri Hospital for treatment and then released often late at night with no way to get themselves home which means that many of them choose not to present at all.
– Wee Waa Local Aboriginal Land Council

 

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