New, bigger Tumut Ambulance Station hopes to attract staff

The opening of the new Tumut Ambulance Station, situated next to the Tumut Hospital, comes after almost five years in the works.

It is a win for the town that was heavily pushed for by Member for Wagga Dr Joe McGirr who fought to see a new station included in plans for the redevelopment of the Tumut Health Precinct announced in 2018.

"The state of the previous station was rated moderate, it was a shocker," Dr McGirr said.

"Now we have a modern, state-of-the-art ambulance facility.

"It's much larger and is connected to the hospital so there will be all of the opportunities of better drop off of patients."

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Dr McGirr said the new station will benefit the town across the board, from improving patient hospital drop-off times to attracting paramedics to the area.

"It means people who have a heart attack or who are involved in an accident will have rapid care," he said.

"Having an Ambulance station like this means we have the capacity to have a 24-hour service and a facility that will attract staff.

"The facility, I'm hoping, will increase the staff numbers there so we will go from having an on-call response system to staff already there, which I think will really help the response times."

The new station also has the capacity to house a larger number of ambulances.

"I think it can take six ambulance vehicles and the previous station, I think, was less than half of that," Dr McGirr said.

"It's quite a large facility, it has a wash bay.

"At the time of the rebuild of the hospital that was long overdue and the fact that the Ambulance Station wasn't initially included in that was a missed opportunity.

"It was very old. It was really at a point where I'm not actually sure it was liveable. It really wasn't good enough."

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