NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard has thrown cold water on a proposal by shadow health minister Ryan Park to open the Bulli urgent care centre seven days a week.
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Visiting Bulli Hospital on Friday, Mr Hazzard said there were not enough staff to run the centre, which currently operates Monday to Friday, all week.
"The government wants to open seven days a week here and it will be done as soon as possible, but until we can train up the nurse practitioners, we just don't have the staff to do it," Mr Hazzard said.
While Mr Hazzard said ideally the urgent care centre would be running seven days a week from "yesterday" he declined to put a time frame on when the facility would operate throughout the week.
"You'd have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to do that."
On Wednesday, Mr Park, who is also the Member for Keira, promised that a Labor NSW government would open the urgent care centre seven days a week if elected, at a cost of a million dollars a year.
The urgent care centre provides treatment for minor injury and illness, similar to a GP.
Since opening in August 2020, the new Bulli Hospital has provided primary care and aged care services, and was used as a site for COVID-19 positive patients during 2021.
After closing in late 2021 and early 2022, due to staff being redirected to other facilities during the busy Summer holiday season, the centre re-opened in May 2022, in part to assist in taking pressure off Wollongong Hospital Emergency Department.
Despite this, wait times have blown out at the region's primary emergency department, with the hospital recording the longest ever wait times in December 2022.
Of the state's comparable hospitals, only Westmead and Liverpool performed worst than Wollongong for median wait times.
Mr Hazzard said on top of shortages of staff, fewer beds were available to new patients in Wollongong Hospital because of a lack of aged care beds in the region.
"More than 100 of those beds are currently occupied by aged care residents or people with disabilities who can't be moved on," he said.
To address the burnout of nurses in hospitals, Wollongong nurses have joined their colleagues throughout the state in calling for mandated staff ratios. At a rally in November, secretary of the NSW Nurses and Midwives Wollongong Hospital Branch Genevieve Stone said the hospital was losing 10 nurses a month, and was short-staffed by 160 nurses at that time.
Mr Hazzard said discussions with the nurses union were ongoing.
"We'd like to work together on appropriate staffing levels."
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