About 1300 people gave up part of their Saturday to walk through the new Dunedin Hospital outpatient building at a free community open day on 12 September, the public’s first look inside before it starts seeing patients in October, RNZ reports.
The five-storey building on Cumberland Street is the first finished part of the New Dunedin Hospital, one of the largest health building projects in the country’s history. It was officially opened and blessed on 28 August and has been in final commissioning since, with clinical equipment being installed and tested and staff training for the move, according to Health New Zealand.
Tours of the inside of the building lasted about half an hour, the Otago Daily Times reported. Staff and their families had already been shown through, and separate tours had been run for people who needed a lower sensory experience.
New Dunedin Hospital programme director Bridget Dickson told RNZ the open day was a significant milestone and a long time coming. “We know that people have been waiting for this opportunity to be able to come inside,” she said.
Dunedin resident Elena Calvert was one of them. “We’ve been waiting for this building to open for probably a decade now,” she told RNZ. She came away impressed with the interior. “It’s a lovely space. It’s so sunny, it’s so bright, it’s colourful, it’s new,” she said.
Ian Ross, who uses outpatient services regularly, said he also wanted to see where his taxpayer dollars had gone. “The existing outpatient facilities are old, they’re tired,” he said.
Not every visitor was won over completely. A retired GP identified only as Sharleen called the building beautiful and fit for purpose, but said it still felt like “a bit of a rabbit warren at the moment”, which she put down to signage and fit-out that had yet to be finished. She was not entirely sold on the self-service check-in kiosks, though she said staff had assured her there would be plenty of people to help and a face-to-face option. She also pointed out that a PET scanner had not yet been promised for the new hospital.
Health New Zealand says the building covers about 15,000 square metres and was finished within its $439.9 million budget. It will house children’s and women’s outpatient services, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, respiratory medicine, physiotherapy, hand therapy, radiology and imaging, day surgery and procedure rooms, according to the agency’s statement on the official opening.
One difference people might notice, Dickson said, was the four full-sized operating theatres and four procedure rooms, which lift the hospital’s capacity for day surgery. “We are aiming for the first year of the operation of this facility to be able to deliver 1700 more day surgery procedures,” she said. She said the target also included 13,000 more imaging scans, covering MRI, CT and X-ray.
The figures given at the official opening were slightly higher for imaging. Once the building is fully open it expects about 1700 more day surgeries, 13,300 more medical imaging appointments and 2700 more medical day stay appointments each year, RNZ reported on 28 August. Some outpatient services will not move into the building until early 2027.
At a pre-dawn blessing before the official opening, representatives of local iwi gave the building the name Whare Mātūtū. Health New Zealand says the name reflects a place of care, recovery and ongoing wellbeing.
Warren and Mahoney Architects principal David Mahon, who worked on the design, told RNZ it included a landscape buffer along Cumberland Street and large windows looking out over historic buildings, the harbour and the city. The design was worked out with the cultural advisers Aukaha, and the building’s yellow tones reflect the sands and colouring of the historic, now reclaimed foreshore, he said. Some patients may be in a room for only 15 or 20 minutes, he said. “But at the same time, you’ve got staff that will be in this building for eight or nine hours a day. So access to daylight is a huge part of a working environment,” he said.
For patients, one point matters more than the paintwork. The emergency department is not moving. It stays at the existing Dunedin Hospital at 201 Great King Street, according to Health New Zealand’s patient information page for the new building. The outpatient building’s address is 360 Cumberland Street, with the main entrance on the corner of Cumberland and St Andrew Streets. There are 12 short-stay parks for drop-offs and pick-ups and six mobility parks near the Cumberland Street entrance, while parking for clinics is at the main hospital site. Patients can check in at a kiosk by scanning the barcode on their appointment letter or typing in their details, or check in with a receptionist in the waiting area.
The first appointment date has not been set. Health New Zealand has said the date will be shared widely before the first patients arrive. Its southern group director of operations, Craig Ashton, said when the open day was announced in August that commissioning and staff training were the priority. “Our focus is on making sure every service is ready to safely welcome patients from day one,” he said.
The outpatient building is the smaller of the two main buildings on the new campus. The 11-storey inpatient building, which will be joined to it by an overhead bridge across St Andrew Street, is due to open in 2031, according to the Health New Zealand project page. Dickson said on Saturday that it was on time and on budget.
Getting to this point took longer than many in the south hoped. In September 2024 a government-commissioned review found the project could not be delivered as planned within its $1.88 billion budget, and ministers said costs could approach $3 billion, RNZ reported at the time. In January 2025 the government confirmed a smaller inpatient building with 351 beds, able to expand to 404, down from the 410 in the earlier design. That decision came after an estimated 35,000 people marched through Dunedin calling for the hospital to be built as first planned, RNZ reported.
The existing hospital has not stood still in the meantime. In July a new $4.3 million cancer treatment machine began treating patients from across the lower South Island.
For Calvert, the open day was a rare chance to see the rooms before anyone has to use them. “You’ll never be able to see into those rooms unless you use them and ideally you don’t want to use them for as long as possible,” she said.
Did you go on one of the tours, or do you have an appointment coming up in the new building? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply