Ballarat Base Hospital's redevelopment starts in April with demolition of Drummond St buildings

The hospital redevelopment, the biggest building project in Ballarat's history, has seen some minor works competed internally to relocate administration and consulting rooms from the building to be demolished.

On Monday April 4, workers from H. Troon will begin demolition work on the old brick buildings,

The works will close about eight on-street parking spaces and cause minor traffic disruption on Drummond Street but the demolition is expected to be complete in June.

Grampians Health interim chief of redevelopment and infrastructure Melanie Robertson said a new building to be built on the site would house the hospital's state-of-the-art pharmacy, pathology, centre for education and training, and various engineering and "back of house infrastructure" spaces.

The new building, which for now is known as the central energy plant building, is expected to go to tender in June and begin construction next year.

"Because of how the site is structured at the moment, and it being a brownfield site, we need to put infrastructure in place first before we can remove some of the buildings to clear the way for the main tower redevelopment with is our stage three," Ms Robertson said.

"It really is with the demolition of this building we will actually start to see a new hospital coming together. This will enable work to make way for a contemporary modern facility to meet the future needs for health care of our community.

"Since the project was announced in 2018 we have been busy planning and doing this work. It's a complex project requiring an incredible amount of detail because we need to keep the site operational 24/7.":

The Ballarat Base Hospital redevelopment, scheduled to be completed in 2027, will deliver a new emergency department, a women and children's hub, state-of-the-art theatre suite, expanded ICU, endoscopy suites and consulting rooms and an extra 100 inpatient and short stay beds.

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Once completed, the upgraded hospital will have the capacity to treat at least 18,000 more emergency patients, an extra 14,500 inpatients per year and boost capacity for an additional 4000 surgeries every year.

Ms Robertson said since the redevelopment project was announced in 2018 and planning began, the goalposts had moved and some initial ideas had changed because of lessons learned throughout the pandemic.

"Things are changing all the time in health care. In mental health we've had the Royal Commission in to Victoria's Mental Health System and an incredible amount of findings from that, there's changes in infrastructure design so we can improve delivery of health care ... and we thought we had an idea of how we wanted wards and the emergency department going back to 2019 but now we are looking at them from a pandemic approach and how we maintain health care while going through a pandemic."

Ms Robertson said surrounding residents and businesses would be notified ahead of demolition works to provide further information about any potential impacts.

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