Construction is now well underway on the major expansion of Osborne Park Hospital (OPH), a central component of the State Government’s $1.8 billion New Women and Babies Hospital Project. The development promises significant investment in women’s and newborn services in Perth’s northern suburbs, including expanded inpatient facilities, a family birth centre, and a dedicated mother-baby mental health unit.
However, infrastructure alone does not guarantee safe, high-quality care. Following consultation with members – senior clinicians in obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics and neonatology – the AMA (WA) wrote to the Minister for Health on 23 March 2026 to outline a series of patient safety, governance and service design concerns. The AMA (WA) awaits the Government’s response, even as physical works continue on site.
At the heart of the AMA (WA)’s concerns is the proposed clinical model for an expanded OPH service. As clinicians have consistently highlighted, OPH does not have an emergency department and lacks co-located adult medical and surgical specialties – capabilities that are typically fundamental to contemporary obstetric and gynaecology services.
In the spirit of constructive engagement, the AMA (WA) requested four areas of clarification from Government.
- The clinical safety rationale for progressing expanded obstetric and gynaecology services at OPH without an emergency department, and with limited acute specialty co-location. This includes how time critical, non-obstetric or non-gynaecological conditions, such as cardiac or neurological emergencies, will be managed in a complex patient cohort.
- Confirmation of the planned clinical escalation pathways for women in the northern suburbs, including retrieval and transfer arrangements, expected time-to-definitive-care, and the workforce assumptions underpinning these processes. This is particularly relevant for acute gynaecological presentations, intra-operative complications, and post-discharge emergencies.
- Clear advice on governance arrangements, including who owns and accepts patient-safety risks, how these risks are being assessed, and what mitigation strategies will be implemented, and when. AMA (WA) members have expressed concern that splitting services across multiple health service providers (North Metropolitan, South Metropolitan and Child and Adolescent Health Services) will likely create fragmentation and ambiguity in accountability.
- Clarity on why clinician-proposed co-located options – particularly at the QEII Medical Centre – have not progressed, and whether these proposals, or a tri-located model aligned with international best practice, could be revisited.
