Walking slowly to be first

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Tim Coster's downhill luge ride was a thrill, but it has put him among the first patients at what will become New Zealand's largest outpatients and short-stay surgery clinic.

Auckland's $30 million Greenlane Clinical Centre opened yesterday. It is the flipside of the $200 million super-hospital in Grafton, which received its first patients last Saturday.

Virtually all of the Auckland District Health Board's more than 400,000 annual outpatient visits will be handled at the new centre once it is fully functioning in early 2005.

Its staff will also care for the increasing number of surgical patients having day and short-stay surgery.

Mr Coster, a 46-year-old Albany electrician and scout leader, was returning from a skiing trip with a group of scouts last month when he was involved in a low-speed crash at Rotorua's tourist luge ride.

"At the end of the run coming into the parking area, the one in front hit the barrier and I went underneath it."

His left ankle broke and he was treated at a North Shore clinic and Auckland Hospital. Yesterday, he went for a check up at the clinical centre.

"It was quite nice I suppose; not crowded like Auckland Hospital," he said.

Staff removed the plaster cast from his ankle, replacing it with a "moon boot", a removable splint. He hopes that at his next appointment, in a month, the doctor will declare him fit to return to work.

Mr Coster was among about 150 outpatients at the new centre on its first day.

He was treated in stage one of the facility, a three-storey building joined to the Green Lane Hospital.

Work on stage two, a refurbishment and upgrading of the hospital, will start in December.

Green Lane's acute adult services are shifting to the new Auckland City Hospital, with those of National Women's and Auckland Hospitals.

The clinical centre will have seven theatres and the same high-tech systems, including computerised x-ray pictures and patient records, as the city hospital and Starship children's hospital.

"We know that if we didn't have access to electronic records, the number [of records] that would have to be travelling between the sites would be unsustainable," said clinic general manager Gaye Tozer.

Board spokeswoman Brenda Saunders said it was decided to have two main sites, rather than concentrate services at Grafton, mainly because of space constraints there, unwillingness to uproot Grafton facilities such as Starship and the radiotherapy machine bunkers, and to minimise the effects on central city traffic congestion.