The Waitemata District Health Board has unveiled a new, state-of-the-art, $39 million elective surgery centre on Auckland's North Shore.
Health minister Tony Ryall had the first tour of the new building, which includes four operating theatres, 40 beds and 10 consulting rooms.
"These are dedicated facilities, so all they do is elective surgery," says Mr Ryall.
"It means more people can be seen faster [and] get home to their families sooner, and that's a win-win for everybody."
From Monday the corridors and wards will start filling up with patients, and eventually the centre expects to be doing around 6000 operations a year.
The first surgery will be conducted by Dr John Cullen - the facility's director who has a ward named after him - on Monday.
"The opportunity was too good to turn down because we can build a building, but how it works is more important," he says.
The centre works using a new model of care: keeping patients with the same medical team for their whole stay, and putting those having similar procedures in wards together so they can be encouraged by each others' progress.
Dr Cullen said that means cheaper operations and shorter hospital stays.
"We keep hearing about not being enough doctors around," he said. "I don't think that's entirely true, and I think that we need to be looking at ways in which we utilise our health workforce better, and this allows us to do that."
It is a model the Government is hoping other DHBs will also follow.
3 News
source: newshub archive
