Depending on how in touch you are with the news cycle, you might've heard the buzz about the latest Victorian budget that was released last week. The state government has been copping some heat about defunding major infrastructure projects, and the timeline of the infamous Melbourne Airport Rail Link being massively blown out. Not only that, but the budget also revealed another major project slated for our city has been totally scrapped.
Back in 2022, the Victorian government promised that Melbourne would be home to the biggest hospital project in the whole country, with a brand-new swanky public hospital in North Melbourne planned to open in 2031. But that plan was pretty short lived, with the sudden announcement last week that the project was cancelled.
The facility was supposed to be another campus for the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Royal Women's Hospital that would help manage the influx of patients from regional Victoria into those two medical facilities each year, with the new site specialising in elective surgeries, outpatient treatment, clinical trials and low-risk women’s healthcare.
The hospital was planned to make up a major part of the future mini-suburb of Arden, which is actually just a pocket of North Melbourne near the existing train station. If that name sounds familiar, it's because it's also where one of the new Metro Tunnel stations is.
In fact, the hospital was supposed to be built right next to the train station, making it super easy for healthcare workers to get to work. The Parkville station is also located across the road from the Royal Melbourne Hospital, so the idea was that people could easily travel between the two facilities.
But apparently the lauded Metro Tunnel was also a major part of the downfall of this canned hospital, because they realised that electromagnetic interference from the underground train station could impact the medical equipment, and it'd be super time-consuming and expensive to fix it. Whoopsy!
With the $2.5 billion dollar hospital project down the drain, the state government has said it'll instead redevelop the existing RMH and RWH hospitals, and build new housing in Arden. The latest budget also included $320 million in funding to continue planning work on the new Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Ringwood East, upgrades for the Dandenong Hospital, redevelopment of the Wonthaggi Hospital and a new hospital for West Gippsland. So it's not all bad.
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