First look at plans for palliative care unit at Mona Vale Hospital site
EARLY drawings of the first inpatient palliative care unit on the northern beaches have been unveiled.
Manly
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EARLY drawings of the first inpatient palliative care unit on the northern beaches have been unveiled.
The 10-bed building (pictured above and below) will be on the far-eastern side of the Mona Vale Hospital site and will have ocean views.
Work will begin by the end of the year.
It comes as Mona Vale Hospital’s services will be downgraded from emergency care to urgent care, when the Northern Beaches Hospital opens in October.
Former Pittwater councillor Kay Millar, of Warriewood, fought for the new unit.
She lost her husband 30 years ago, just six weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.
He was 38 and she was 32.
“I was looking after our three children including five-year-old twins and an 18-month-old and caring for my husband by myself at home,” Ms Millar said. “I was administering his morphine until the last two days of his life, when I couldn’t give him the care he needed anymore.”
She said Mona Vale Hospital did not want to take him but she got him in there in the end.
Ms Millar said she could not have travelled to a palliative care unit on the north shore with three young children.
She is on the working party for the new unit and said it would be a place where adult patients of all ages and their families could “feel at home”, smell the sea breeze and listen to the surf.
Pittwater state MP Rob Stokes said the unit would allow people in the latter stages of their lives to remain on the beaches instead of having to go to the north shore.
“This is an ideal location for an increasingly important service that’s never been available in this way on the northern beaches,” Mr Stokes said. “It’s envisaged the new unit will have a less clinical look and feel than acute hospitals — with the aim of providing a comfortable and welcoming environment for patients and their families during the most difficult and challenging times.”
The palliative care unit will be in a separate building, where the helipad is now, but linked to the geriatric unit which was built in 2014. The helipad will move 100m.
A community health service centre was also opened on the site in 2016.
Health bosses plan to turn the emergency department into a 24/7 urgent care unit when the new hospital opens in Frenchs Forest.
Those with less serious injuries such as cuts or broken limbs, or who are sick but not critical, can still get treatment at Mona Vale.
There are also plans for an onsite ambulance facility.