Kingston Mayor’s Message November 2015
Welcome to the November Mayoral message. We’re in Moorabbin and we’re outside what you would recognise as Holmesglen TAFE. As you can see, it’s currently being transformed, and it’s being transformed into 150 bed private hospital that will have an emergency department, oncology, orthopaedics, and an intensive care unit.
This is a wonderful facility to have in our city and we’re so grateful that Healthscope has chosen this site. They’ve worked in partnership with Holmesglen on a long-lease arrangement that delivers this sort of facility into the heart of Moorabbin.
It really fits in with what we’re doing in Moorabbin, with the residential redevelopment in and around the shopping precinct of Moorabbin, and of course the Moorabbin development with the St Kilda Football Club.
We also hope that a facility like this is going to attract investment in and around the area from specialists who work in the hospital and see patients in the hospital. So it’s really a very, very bright future for this part of Moorabbin.
This council has made some pretty big decisions over the last 3 years, but none more so than the one we’ve made recently in relation to aged care. For some time we’ve been contemplating where Kingston’s aged care goes in the future. Federal regulations have changed and they’ve basically demanded that people be able to age in place; the low-care high-care model of which Kingston has been a part of for a number of years is no longer acceptable, and the facilities we run in several locations throughout the city simply are not designed for people to age in place. So we had to make a decision as to what we did in the future and we determined that we would put our aged care facilities out for public expressions of interest. We would ask an expert provider, “Can you do what we want you to do for our residents in Kingston?” We took the process of assessing each potential provider out of the hands of councillors and we put it in the hands of experts. And we had a report come back to council recently that determined that there was one supplier of aged care services that was quite clearly the best choice we could arrive at. That was recommended to council and council ratified that a couple of weeks ago.
And that provider is Southern Cross Care (Victoria) and they’ve got eight facilities throughout Victoria and they do an outstanding job. And the things that we wanted: we wanted to provide the very best facilities with aging in place, obviously foremost in our mind; we wanted to make sure that our existing staff, who have been wonderful over an extended period, would be given the opportunity to work in whatever new arrangement we came to; and we wanted to make sure that our residents were included irrespective of their financial position. Southern Cross Care met all those requirements. They will build a new facility in Collins Street in Mentone. That will commence soon. Council decided on that quite some time ago. We’re really looking forward to this project coming to fruition. This is an exciting project. As I said, this is the biggest decision this council will make; it’s the most important decision this council will make, and I’m very proud to have been part of that council that made that decision.
I just wanted to thank everybody who’s taken the time to watch these Mayoral messages. This is my final message for the year, and by the time that we do this again it will be a new Mayor. The Mayoralty is a 12month term and mine concludes on November 11th. But I just wanted to take this opportunity to, as I say, thank you for taking the time to interact with the City of Kingston, watch these Mayoral messages. Those that have commented and written in, that’s fantastic, we really appreciate that. It’s been an honour to be the Mayor of Kingston this year. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope that people can look back and say in the last 12months that we’ve done some really good things in the City of Kingston, and I’m sure it will continue on next year. Thanks very much.