The last line of defence
When I was in second class in the 1960s I spent a month in the Manning Base Hospital recovering from croup.
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The base hospital then was the biggest and best of any hospital from Newcastle to the Queensland border. Now it is not even a trauma hospital like Port Macquarie although the population it serves is the same size as Port’s or even a lessor standard acute hospital.
When David West attended a meeting with the then mayor Les Brown in Tamworth in 1993 on the integration of the Manning Base hospital into the Hunter New England area, Les, one of Taree’s great mayors and member of the Rotary Club of Taree, commented to him, ’We’re dead ‘and ‘This is the beginning of the end of Manning Base Hospital’.
How accurate he was, the hospital has since suffered a death by 1000 cuts. No longer is it the biggest and best hospital from Newcastle to the Queensland border.
Every man, woman and child in the MidCoast Council area, all 91,000 of us, should stand up and fight for increased funding to our local hospital – it’s a matter of life and death.
