The Bendigo Advertiser is continuing to publish a series of profiles on some of the people helping to build the new Bendigo Hospital.
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STUART Turk was helping shape the new Bendigo Hospital project before funding was even secured.
Mr Turk is a senior project officer with Bendigo Health and has been working on the project for more than four years.
"Previously I've been in nursing for 15 years in a variety of areas," he said.
"I came on before there was funding so I was actually employed to assist with the development of a model of care which is how you operate your service, how you provide your service.
I was actually employed to assist with the development of a model of care.
- Stuart Turk
"Then I moved on to a thing called feasibility study."
Much of Mr Turk's work has included identifying key stake holders and encouraging them to attend regular meetings to detail how they wanted to deliver the services.
"Then it was working through the feasibility study - looking at numbers of rooms and working out how many you would need in each department to actually fit this service profile," he said.
"The service profile is set by the state - they said to ensure so many beds for this and so many beds for that.
"Part of my job was to actually challenge that so I had to go away and say okay, they've given us so many oncology chairs, is that enough?
"Does that meet what we think we'll do in the future?
"And we had to look at the demographic data and the burden of disease, the incidents of cancer, how we treat them and how many people we actually sent to Melbourne.
"So it was looking at where we fall down because of lack of service facility."
Mr Turk said after the funding was secured for the project he moved on to developing the functional brief.
"That's a document that describes built space and function within built space," he said.
"We worked on the scope of the project with a team from the Department of Health and then we worked through the various department with the users as to how many rooms we needed.
"Part of that is going and looking at new places and how they do things.
"I don't actually look for what's good, I look for what doesn't work because we don't want a build that doesn't work."
Mr Turk said it was exciting to play a part in the project.
"When I first started I didn't think it would be of this magnitude," he said.
Keep an eye on the Bendigo Advertiser's Hospital HQ page at www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/hospitalhq/ for the next hospital profile.