The new chair of the Northern NSW Local Health District board says overseeing development of the new Tweed hospital will be his main priority in the role.
Mark Humphries has been promoted from his deputy chair position to lead the local health district board after the departure of Dr Brian Pezzutti.
The district is responsible for state health services from Grafton in the south to Tweed in the north.
Nearly 3,000 babies born in region’s state hospitals in 2020
More than 210,000 people went to state emergency departments in the region last year, Mr Humphries says, with 96,000 people admitted to hospital in general and 32,000 arriving by ambulance.
State health workers performed around 30,000 operations or related procedures, and there were nearly 3,000 babies born in the district’s maternity wards.
‘So you can see the volume of work that our team put in,’ Mr Humphries says.
$673 million Tweed Hospital ‘well advanced’, says health board chair
Mr Humphries says NSW Health has been investing in local infrastructure such as the Byron hospital, a helipad at Maclean District Hospital and new services in Evans Head and Coraki further south.
He says the new hospital in the Tweed Shire is another major improvement to health services on the Northern Rivers.
‘The project is well advanced,’ Mr Humphries says, ‘as you know it’s an approximately $673 million dollar development, it’s running on schedule’.
Mr Humphries says he was on the new Tweed hospital site recently where concrete slabs were down and construction was rising with three cranes at work.
Building is due to finish by the end of the year with the hospital to open to the public by mid-2023.
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