Remember? Sir Humphrey assured his Minister, Jim Hacker MP, it was obviously the best hospital in Britain – because it had no patients.

It follows that the new $187 million South East Regional Hospital (SERH) near Bega must be the best hospital in NSW, for another 12 months - until it gets some 

actual patients in 2016.  

And if the culture of the new Bega hospital is going to be just the culture of the old Bega hospital transferred, things are going to go downhill pretty fast. 

I mean transfer of the staff culture, not the bacteria.

For all the newspaper colour advertising, PR and “community consultation” it’s proving really hard for we (the people) to get a good look inside our new hospital we’re spending $187 million of our hard-earned dollars on.

We were all invited to the community open day last Friday.  

Standing under a tent in the hospital paddock we could see the splendid new building containing, we were told, as much reinforcing steel as one million blocks of Bega cheese.  

Remarkable. 

But were we going to actually inspect the building? 

Well, no … not really – a draw was conducted from entry tickets and a mere eight people out of the hundreds 

present were selected to inspect inside the new hospital – but only if they waited 2.5 hours in the paddock in a sweltering 28C until 4.45pm. 

The rest of us were left standing 200 metres back in the hot paddock while the Governor and the pollies and assorted VIPs got their red carpet look inside at 2.30pm.

Forlornly, most of us realised this had been a Clayton’s Open Day with the only thing “open” to us being the hospital paddock. 

So we made the commonsense call to climb back in our cars and depart back to the real world. 

But at least we’d had a glimpse of the “best hospital in NSW” – temporarily.

Jon Gaul

Tura Beach