RELATED: Hospital staff get set for big move
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The countdown to the opening of the new Bendigo hospital has entered its final week.
The excitement of Bendigo Health’s staff is evident in the corridors of the existing hospital.
A colourful sign on one of the doors en route to the Orthopaedic Ward marks the number of days until January 24.
Someone has drawn a big, round smiley face on the sign in a blue marker.
Working in the Orthopaedic Ward are two nurses who made the shift from the old hospital into the Hyett Block at the existing hospital in the late 1970s.
They’re now part of the move team for the new hospital.
Vivien Boyer worked in the Nightingale wards at the old hospital when she was a student nurse, in 1976.
She was among the team that moved into the “new” block two years later.
“I feel very privileged to be among a few long serving staff members who will be making this move to the new hospital,” she said.
“There’s only a handful of people who have actually had that ability to say they have been in three hospitals in their lifetime on the one campus.”
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Friend and colleague Anne Elphinstone worked the first evening shift in charge of Ward 4, the medical ward, when she moved into the Hyett Block, in December 1979.
“The young ones think this is the new hospital, bless them,” Anne said.
She started at Bendigo Health in 1973, then a 17-year-old trainee at the hospital-based training school.
“Back in 1973, there weren’t all these choices,” Anne said.
“You went into nursing or you went into teaching and I thought nursing sounded pretty interesting, so I went into nursing. I loved it so I’ve stuck at it ever since.
“I’ve had three single years off, having kids.”
If someone had told the two nurses it wouldn’t be their last move to a new hospital, at the time of the Hyett Block’s opening, they wouldn’t have believed it.
“We are so absolutely excited about the whole thing, to see the differences in patient outcomes, and where we are moving to now is just unbelievable, really,” Vivien said.
The move from the old hospital to the existing block was an improvement in patient care, in the 1970s.
“We didn’t have the technology we have today,” Vivien said.
“We basically had patients that would stay in bed for up to 12 weeks.
“Sometimes they developed pneumonia and very nasty pressure sores and the outcomes weren’t all that good.
“We moved into the Hyett Block and saw a change in technologies.”
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Technologies included the fixation of the hips, which sped up the recovery process.
Within a week or two, Vivien said patients moved on to rehabilitation facilities that didn’t exist at the previous hospital.
“That was absolutely life changing, for so many people in our community,” she said.
“The outcomes were far better.”
“What we are moving to over there [in the new hospital], well that’s just a dream come true for most of us because it’s state-of-the-art,” Vivien said.
“Bendigo has got to be very proud of it.”
She and Anne can’t wait to work in an environment with beautiful courtyards – places designed for the peace and serenity of patients and their loved ones, the likes of which they have never had access to before.
Vivien said the new hospital had more lifting equipment, which was at hand almost immediately.
“Whereas before we had been limited with our equipment,” she said.
And there is monitoring technology in all the wards, which Vivien said would allow for better patient care.
“We’re pretty stoked,” she said.
“It’s very emotional.”
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Aside from technology, Anne said the greatest improvement to patient care during her 44 years of nursing was Medical Emergency Team, or MET, calls.
“If you’re worried about a patient or their observations go out of parameters that have been set, you call a team down and they look at them,” she explained.
“In the early days, we didn’t have any of that and patients got sicker and sicker.
“We used to have to just call for a doctor and wait until they came, and that was it. We didn’t have the technology to intervene.
“Whereas now you call a MET call and doctors come down, straight away. They intervene and the outcome is amazing.”
Anne was also among the nurses who went on strike in 1986, in favour of nurse-to-patient ratios.
“Which we still have to this day,” she said.
Her advice for nurses of the future is not to get too caught up in all the technology.
“That’s the most important thing to remember: the patients come first,” Anne said.
“And you’ve got to talk to them.
Always listen to the relatives, too, she said.
“Because the relatives know their relatives better than we do,” Anne said.
One week to go: What you need to know ahead of Bendigo Health’s big move
- Traffic management will be in place around the hospital precinct on move day, from 8am on January 24.
- The existing emergency department closes at 8am on move day. That’s when the new emergency department, at Drought Street, opens. Bendigo Health has advised people in need of emergency care from 8am on January 24 to present at the new hospital.
- There will be no visitors to the hospital before 5pm on move day. Visitors after that time will be restricted to next of kin and immediate family.
- More than 200 patients will be moved to the new hospital between the hours of 8am and 5pm.