Public health unit moving to hospital

Gerald Ford | 11th November 2008

A $5.8 million regional council building plan will displace the Wairarapa Public Health Unit, sending it to hospital as part of a $7 million upgrade there.

The Choice Health building on Chapel Street, Masterton, will move to make way for a new building housing Greater Wellington's Wairarapa office a project approved by the council last week.

A new community health building is now planned on the Wairarapa Hospital site. Estimated to cost $2.8 million, the new building comes on top of plans announced in June for a $3.5 million "library and learning centre" now renamed as a clinical support centre.

Finally a $700,000 child and adolescent dental centre has also been proposed to sit alongside, or adjoin, the community health project.

"We've known for some time that we have to exit that (Chapel Street) building," DHB facilities and logistics manager Peter Clayton said yesterday.

He said the DHB has a plan to relocate public health staff in part of the old hospital until the new facility is built.

"We've got contingencies in place, to use one of our existing buildings in the old campus.

"We've certainly got space for that at the moment; we're never quite sure when the requirement (to move) would be."

Mr Clayton said the new plans are "pretty exciting" although still in the concept and design stage. The clinical support centre, however, is now awaiting a building consent.

The community health building will be across the hospital driveway from the new building.

Set in an elbow shape, the design runs at a distance around the hospital's helipad, and links up to the old hospital car park, now under-used. It will contain two clinics for community nurses, as well as the public health workers now operating out of the Choice Health building.

Mr Clayton said the need to move out of the old building "was always a part of" the decision to build a new one, "but moving forward and looking for a complete campus at some stage it was going to be necessary".

"There are still funding issues but it's going to happen."