It is an audible and visual reminder that the city‘s hospital is not just for its residents. Dunedin Hospital serves the wider south, and many of the patients being cared for on any day of the year are from Invercargill, Riverton, Gore, Balclutha, the Catlins, Wanaka, Queenstown, Alexandra, Roxburgh, Oamaru, or the many other communities of Otago and Southland.
So when Dunedin marches today, fighting against cuts to Dunedin Hospital, it does so in solidarity with our friends and family across the lower South.
It also does so for the rest of New Zealand.
The hospital is also a crucial training centre for the medical workforce of tomorrow, thanks to the city’s exceptional Medical School and the nursing and allied health training provided through Otago Polytechnic.
Many of the professionals who will staff hospitals throughout the rest of New Zealand will qualify to do so after excellent training at Dunedin Hospital.
Dunedin marches in the face of seemingly unsurmountable odds. The government has cited a big, scary number — $3 billion — as the potential cost if the new hospital is built as planned.
Many will look at that astronomical figure, look at the percentage of New Zealand’s population which lives south of the Waitaki, and balk.
But it is a bill which New Zealand Inc can ill afford not to meet. The drastic changes to Dunedin Hospital which are now proposed come with regional and national implications and ramifications.
Health Minister Shane Reti and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop are correct to question the continual budget blowouts this project has endured, but whatever "punishment" is meted out for them should not come at the additional cost of poorer health services for the people of the South. There are many more hospital builds to come — in equally as deserving towns and cities throughout New Zealand. Let the lessons of Dunedin inform how those are paid for and planned.
But it would be grossly unfair on southerners, who were promised a hospital that the country would be proud of, to instead be left with an inadequate facility which is a shadow of itself, and one which the government would surely have to upgrade again in the near future, rather than rest easy knowing that an intergenerational hospital exists to serve the South well for decades to come.
Will a protest march change ministerial minds which are seemingly made up? Perhaps not immediately, but not marching will certainly not dissuade them either.
Indeed, a big, loud, demonstration of the anger felt across the South, by those of all political affiliations, may be the only thing which can sway the government to rethink this decision, one borne of short-term financial expediency rather than long-term social wellbeing.
The South has reversed ill-thought out decrees about the provision of health services in the region before. Thousands, memorably, rallied to the cause of keeping a neurosurgery service in Dunedin and their voices were heeded.
This is a similar situation, but on a much bigger scale and with far further reaching implications. The grandchildren of the youngest marchers will be affected by the government’s final decision.
Let the message be sent, in no uncertain terms, that what the South needs and deserves, is the hospital which it has been promised.
