Medical and surgical services, accident and emergence, maternity services and emergency surgical intervention that have all been available to a population stretching from Orbost and Mallacoota in the south to Bombala and Merimbula and its surrounds in the west and north are now under serious threat as the direct result of GSAHS's insidious campaign.

Prior to this current destructive maladministration the community felt pride in their hospital and gratitude for the quality services it provided.

Nine local GPs held visiting rights.

The annual multitude of holiday makers, daily Princes Highway travellers, occasional seafarers (including annual Sydney to Hobart race competitors) and regular plane commuters, showed confidence in visiting the Far South Coast knowing that the Pambula Hospital functioned at a high level.

Since 2005 adequate funds have not been allocated for general maintenance of the building and equipment so that nurses have found difficulty in properly fulfilling their responsibilities.

Recently, an unsolicited and unilateral GSAHS administrative decision was made to alternate some fully functional Pambula services between Pambula and Bega Hospitals on a weekly basis.

Rostering nurses between these workplaces and the imposition of awkwardly devised shift arrangements were both implemented without discussion, more it seems, to destabilise the working conditions of the Pambula hospital nursing staff than to expedite better health care in this area.

This period of poor maintenance, divisive shift management, and the consequent steady erosion of espirit-de-corp so disillusioned nursing staff that some left Pambula or quit the profession altogether and were not replaced.

This chain of events could clearly have been anticipated and avoided.

In fact it seems to have been expected and welcomed by GSAHS administrators.

Too few available nursing staff then predictably became the rationale used to justify subsequent GSAHS decisions to further downgrade the Pambula hospital's services.

In early September all maternity services were moved to Bega.

This decision was implemented while one of Pambula's Visiting Medical Officers and the most consistently vocal and vehement critic of GSAHS administration was on vacation.

It is now difficult to avoid the conclusion that GSAHS's apparent maladministration, which caused general nursing and theatre staff numbers to drop in the first place, has been a deliberate ploy designed force the closure of maternity and operating theatre services at Pambula as a first stage in certain demolition.

This Machiavellian strategy, evil in both substance and style, aligns with the past defeated proposals to close the Pambula hospital altogether.

Dr Rob Morton, chairman of the Pambula Medical Staff Council and Visiting Medical Officer at Pambula District Hospital last week tended his resignation from that latter post in frustration at this strangulation of services at Pambula District Hospital.

Quoted in the Merimbula News Weekly of September 17, Dr Morton is reported in saying, "We need to change the mindset of the middle management in charge of the hospital and I refer to the people who are looking after the services on the ground. They are not looking at Pambula hospital as a service that is respected and appreciated."

As has been the case in the past this local community wants Pambula hospital to remain open and re-establish the high level of health care it can and has achieved. It must be allowed to provide that vital community service and must not be vandalised in this way.