A new $28 million building at Werribee Mercy Hospital is at risk of closing just four months after it opened due to federal budget cuts.
The Catherine McAuley Centre is a rehabilitation and geriatric medicine complex for patients in Melbourne’s west who are recovering from surgery or serious injury.
The two-storey building, opened in February, has 60 beds including eight two-bed rooms and 14 single-bed rooms.
Federal Labor MP Joanne Ryan said funding cuts could lead Mercy Health, which runs the hospital, to close the facility.
Mercy Health executive director of health services Linda Mellors confirmed federal funding for sub-acute services in the building would end on June 30.
“We’re now waiting on our budget for the next financial year,” she said. “The rehabilitation and geriatric evaluation and management beds have been full almost since we opened.
“These services were desperately needed and I’m certain the community would be disadvantaged if they were no longer available.”
Doubt over the centre’s future follows the federal government’s failure to renew a national partnership agreement that last year provided 326 sub-acute beds in Victoria at a cost of $155 million.
The beds are used for patients needing less intensive hospital care, such as elderly patients recovering after an operation.
The loss of sub-acute beds could lead to patients staying longer in high-care beds, or being discharged too early and possibly requiring readmission to hospital.
A spokesman for federal Health Minister Peter Dutton said health funding to Victoria would rise from $3.46 billion in 2013-14 to $4.69 billion by 2017-18.
“In regards to sub-acute beds, Ms Ryan knows full well that was a one-off funding arrangement, like many other programs provided to the states,” the spokesman said.
“Ms Ryan should explain why she’s attempting to mislead her constituents and why Labor didn’t make any funding available in their forward estimates.”
The four-year national partnership agreement, signed in 2010, shows where sub-acute beds were to be provided, including 60 beds at Alfred Health, 36 beds at Peninsula Health and 34 beds at Eastern Health, which are now under threat.
Victorian Health Minister David Davis told Parliament on Tuesday the state was continuing to pursue an agreement with the federal government on sub-acute beds.
The state’s 2014-15 budget delivered in May said: ‘‘Victoria will not meet any funding gap left by Commonwealth funding agreements that do not continue.”
Opposition health spokesman Gavin Jennings said Mr Davis was ‘‘trying to pretend there is no immediate problem’’, but there was ‘‘no way these sub-acute beds are going to be protected in the long-term’’.
– with the Star Weekly