The debate surrounding the location of the proposed Bathurst Integrated Medical Centre shows that the council failed when it declared the area around the Bathurst Base Hospital as the medical precinct.

You only have to look to Orange to see how a dedicated and unconstrained medical precinct should work.

It would make sense for a development such as Bathurst Integrated Medical Centre to be built within the medical precinct, but there are very few locations within the precinct that a development of this scale could be built without taking away park or sporting facilities, moving the council depot or buying up other land and demolishing houses.

OTHER RECENT LETTERS:

When the new base hospital was built in the early 2000s, it should have been built on a greenfield site where it would not have the constraints for parking and expansion that the current site has.

This error could have been fixed had council declared a greenfield site for the medical precinct.

The private hospital and other services could have been the first facility built on that site, with a future Bathurst Base Hospital built at a later time.