Shoalhaven's new hospital opens 28 October. Batemans Bay loses its ED in 2027.

If you live between Nowra and Narooma, where you go in an emergency is about to change twice. First, on Wednesday 28 October 2026, Shoalhaven Memorial Hospital moves its emergency department, intensive care and operating theatres into a new seven-storey building beside the old one on Scenic Drive. Second, in 2027, the Eurobodalla Regional Hospital opens south of Moruya and the existing Moruya and Batemans Bay hospitals close, including the emergency department Batemans Bay has had for more than 50 years. Health Infrastructure NSW has not named a month for Moruya, so neither do we.

The Shoalhaven change is an addition: new wards, twice the theatres, a helipad, and fewer transfers to Wollongong. The Eurobodalla change is a trade: a bigger, higher-level hospital in the middle of the shire, in exchange for a longer trip for the people at its northern end. This story sets out what the official documents say about both, and where the documents go quiet.

Nowra, 28 October: what moves into the new building

Health Infrastructure announced on 31 August 2026 that the acute services building will open to patients on Wednesday 28 October 2026, and that the building was entering the commissioning phase, with teams working on finishing touches like stocking supplies, testing equipment and staff orientation (opening announcement). Until then, The current hospital continues to operate as usual with minimal disruption to patients.

The building is the centrepiece of the $440 million redevelopment. According to the project page, updated 2 October 2026, and the 30 July 2026 completion notice, it holds:

• a new emergency department with an emergency short-stay unit, and a new intensive care unit;
• double the number of operating theatres, endoscopy and procedure rooms, plus an overnight surgical unit and a day surgery unit;
• a cardiology inpatient unit, coronary care unit and cardiac catheterisation laboratory, and new vascular surgery;
• medical wards for gastroenterology, respiratory, oncology, endocrinology and general medicine, an expanded stroke unit, an acute aged care ward and a paediatric assessment unit;
• an acute mental health unit and a psychiatric emergency care centre;
• a new MRI service, a nuclear medicine department and expanded imaging;
• a rooftop helipad with a dedicated lift to the emergency department and intensive care.

The helipad completed test landings in April 2026. It sits 34 metres above ground level and spans 25 metres in diameter and was built with 30 truckloads of concrete (helipad notice, 2 April 2026). The pharmacy, moving into new rooms, gets the first pharmacy dispensing robot in a regional NSW hospital (4 May 2026).

What it means for a patient is stated plainly on the project page: the hospital will provide the majority of emergency, critical care, acute, subacute and non-admitted services locally, reducing the need to transfer patients to Wollongong and Sydney. That is the point of the building. A Shoalhaven resident with a heart attack, a stroke or a fracture that needs theatre has, until now, often been driven or flown north. From 28 October more of that care is meant to happen in Nowra.

Two things the official pages do not say. They give no bed count for the new building or the whole hospital, only the scope list above. And they say nothing about the mechanics of 28 October itself: when the old emergency department stops taking ambulances, what happens to the vacated space, or whether a patient who arrives that morning is treated in the old department or the new one. The project team's address is on the project page; we have not yet put the question to them. The page does say that after the move the project focus will turn to the refurbishment of the existing hospital, with works expected to be complete in 2027.

The open day: Saturday 17 October

Before patients move in, the public can walk through parts of the building. The Community Open Day is Saturday 17 October 2026, 10am to 3pm, with guided tours, staff to talk to and the chance to discover how the redevelopment will support healthcare delivery for years to come. Tour places are limited and registration is recommended through TryBooking. Parking is in the hospital's multi-storey car park and Saturday bus timetables apply.

Moruya, 2027: a bigger hospital, and two closures

The Eurobodalla Regional Hospital is being built on the Princes Highway just south of Moruya, on a greenfield site beside the TAFE campus. Main works began in July 2024 under Multiplex, and Health Infrastructure's project page, updated 10 September 2026, says Construction for the new hospital is underway and is expected to open in 2027. Elsewhere on the same page the wording is that construction is expected to be completed in 2027. This will be followed by a period of operational commissioning. Fit-out and landscaping were under way in September 2026, the highway roundabout is finished, and the region's first public MRI machine and a new CT scanner were delivered that month (10 September 2026).

The new hospital is a Level 4 facility, replacing the Level 3 Moruya and Level 2 Batemans Bay hospitals, and will be larger than both Moruya and Batemans Bay hospitals combined. Its scope is a larger emergency department, an eight-bed intensive care and close observation unit, which is the shire's first ICU, operating theatres and a day surgery unit, expanded chemotherapy and renal dialysis, paediatrics, maternity and a special care nursery, short-stay mental health beds, and the MRI. Like the Shoalhaven pages, the official Eurobodalla pages publish no bed number: the FAQ says only that the hospital will deliver an increase in bed numbers. The planning documents are a little more specific. The traffic assessment lodged with the EIS modelled about 127 beds in 2026 and about 165 in 2036, against a combined 111 beds at the two existing hospitals. Those are modelling assumptions from 2023, not a commitment.

What happens to the old hospitals is not in doubt. The EIS answers the question directly: once the new hospital is operational, the existing Batemans Bay and Moruya hospitals will be shut down. Health Infrastructure's FAQ says the same, and that Plans for the remaining part of Batemans Bay Hospital site, which is owned by the NSW Government, are yet to be determined. The Response to Submissions put the workforce moving across at about 400 staff, with over 100 more staff to support the expanded role of the new ERH (RtS, page 33), and the EIS forecast approximately 518 operational jobs at the time of opening, and 594 jobs by 2031 (EIS, page 38).

What stays in Batemans Bay

Two services remain on the Pacific Street site. The Batemans Bay Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, which opened in December 2023, stays where it is, open 6am to midnight, seven days. Health Infrastructure's FAQ says Since opening in 2023, it has averaged between 30 and 70 presentations per day. The FAQ describes it as a service for illness or injury that is not an emergency, so that patients can be treated without waiting in a busy emergency department; it is not an emergency department. Beside it, the $20 million Batemans Bay Community Health building, under construction since May 2025, is due to finish in late 2026 and will house allied health, child and family services, women's health, community nursing, palliative care, Aboriginal health, mental health and drug and alcohol services, specialist outpatient clinics and pathology.

The emergency department: what the official record says

Health Infrastructure's reasons for closing the Batemans Bay emergency department are given in its FAQ. Concentrating services on one campus means more timely, decisive and coordinated care, better recruitment and retention of skilled clinicians, access to new technology and innovation, and greater efficiency, and Operating two Emergency Departments within close proximity presents significant workforce and operational challenges. The EIS's analysis of alternatives lists six options, from keeping both hospitals as they are to the greenfield build that was chosen. Option 4, upgrading and extending both Batemans Bay and Moruya, was rejected on the ground that it would lead to insufficient outcomes and a lack of service integration. That one table cell is the whole of the EIS's reasoning on the two-hospital alternative; the FAQ's workforce argument is the rest of the public case.

On the question most people in Batemans Bay are asking, how long the trip takes, the official documents offer three figures and no ambulance study. The traffic and transport assessment, by Bitzios Consulting for Health Infrastructure and dated 22 May 2023, says the site is approximately 26-minute drive from the existing Batemans Bay Hospital and 5-minute drive from the existing Moruya Hospital, sourced to Google Maps (page 10). The 143-page report then assesses car parking, the highway roundabout, the ambulance bays and bus routes, which is what a traffic assessment is for; it does not model an emergency journey from Batemans Bay. The social impact assessment, by Ethos Urban, records as a negative operational impact the inconvenience to residents of Batemans Bay who previously had relied on the ease of accessing Batemans Bay Hospital, who will travel an additional 20 minutes, and notes that a minority of those consulted saw the Moruya site as a potential health risk should they have to travel from Batemans Bay to Moruya in the event of an emergency (page 34). The engagement report records that at the 2021 and 2022 information sessions Some community members opposed the closure of the Batemans Bay Hospital due to the 20-minute distance between Moruya and Batemans Bay. (page 19).

The planning assessment did not take the question further. The Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure's assessment report of May 2024 records that the EIS exhibition from 7 September to 4 October 2023 drew four public submissions, two in support and two objecting, plus a supportive submission from Eurobodalla Shire Council, and lists the key concerns as pedestrian access, helicopter noise, workforce accommodation and site access during floods. Travel time from Batemans Bay is not among them. Consent was granted on 24 May 2024, and a second modification moving the helipad to the north-east of the campus was approved on 2 April 2026. In our reading the emergency department's closure was never a planning question: the consent is for a hospital at Moruya, and what the Local Health District does with Batemans Bay is a health policy decision outside the planning system.

What the Local Health District and NSW Ambulance have published on the day-to-day consequence is in the same FAQ. In the future, all ambulances in the Eurobodalla will go directly to the new emergency department at Eurobodalla Regional Hospital. Triple Zero calls will continue to be triaged by clinical urgency; where an ambulance is not needed immediately, clinicians at the Virtual Clinical Care Centre do a secondary triage and may refer the patient to a GP or pharmacist. On congestion at the Moruya bridge, the answer is that paramedics and police work together to coordinate the traffic flow and patient movement. On extra ambulances, the FAQ points to the statewide program for 500 regional paramedics, of whom over 375 paramedics have commenced roles across regional NSW since the rollout began in 2024, with future placements decided using NSW Ambulance workforce data. No Eurobodalla-specific allocation is stated.

What the community and its representatives have said

A paper petition signed by more than 10,000 persons asking the Legislative Assembly to call on the Government to not proceed with the proposed closure of the emergency department at the Batemans Bay District Hospital was presented by Mark Speakman on 9 May 2024 (Hansard, page 9528). The ABC, in a report on 17 August 2026, put the petition's eventual total at about 18,000 signatures and quoted the founder of the community group Don't Close Batemans Bay ED: We've actually measured it under the lights and sirens situation from the Batemans Bay CBD to the new hospital site, and it's 29 minutes at best. The same report quoted a Batemans Bay GP, Even with a clear run, it's 30 minutes, and said Eurobodalla Shire Council had voted unanimously to lobby the state government against the closure, with Mayor Mathew Hatcher saying it's been made pretty clear by the state at all levels from the Premier down that they will not be changing their tune. Those are the group's, the doctor's and the mayor's figures and words, reported by the ABC; we have not measured the trip.

The government's reply, in the same report, is that the trip takes an ambulance 15 to 20 minutes. Health Minister Ryan Park said in a statement that The site was selected with existing roads and traffic taken into consideration. The Member for Bega, Dr Michael Holland, said The emergency department in itself will have more treatment spaces compared to the [current] two emergency departments combined, and that By keeping two hospitals open, you can't achieve that greater provision of care because of the challenges in retaining staff and workforce.

Every Batemans Bay to Moruya hospital travel time we found in the record, and who gave it.

Figure	Who said it	Where
26 minutes	Bitzios Consulting for Health Infrastructure, driving, from Google Maps	Traffic and transport assessment, 22 May 2023, page 10
20 minutes extra	Ethos Urban for Health Infrastructure, residents' added travel	Social impact assessment, 31 May 2023, page 40
20 minutes	Community members at 2021 and 2022 sessions, as recorded by Ethos Urban	Engagement report, 21 February 2023, page 19
15 to 20 minutes	Health Minister Ryan Park and Bega MP Dr Michael Holland, by ambulance	ABC News, 17 August 2026
29 minutes "at best"	Founder of Don't Close Batemans Bay ED, measured under lights and sirens	ABC News, 17 August 2026
30 minutes	A Batemans Bay GP, "even with a clear run"	ABC News, 17 August 2026

Our reading of the table is this. The only travel time in any document the government lodged is 26 minutes, and it is a Google Maps estimate for a car, not a measurement of an ambulance. The 15 to 20 minute figure the Minister and the local member have given is not in the EIS, the social impact assessment, the engagement report, the Response to Submissions or the Department's assessment, and no page we could find says how it was arrived at. The community group's 29 minutes is a measurement, but a private one, and it starts from the town centre rather than the hospital. Nobody has published an ambulance-based figure with a method behind it. That is the gap, and it is a fillable one: NSW Ambulance holds the response and transport data for every job it has run between Batemans Bay and Moruya. Publishing it would settle the argument one way or the other, and the people being asked to accept the change are entitled to it before the doors close.

None of this is an argument that the consolidation is wrong. The case for it in the documents is real: a Level 2 emergency department cannot do what a Level 4 hospital with an ICU can, the Response to Submissions records 139 helicopter retrievals from Batemans Bay and Moruya Hospitals in the previous financial year and expects the number to fall once more patients can be treated in the shire (RtS, page 42), and a town the ABC puts at more than 19,300 people that needs a cath lab or a neonatal unit will not get one by keeping a small hospital open. It is an argument that the one number people most want has never been produced by the one agency that has it.

Dates to hold

• Saturday 17 October 2026, 10am to 3pm: Shoalhaven Memorial Hospital open day, Scenic Drive, Nowra. Register at TryBooking.
• Wednesday 28 October 2026: the Shoalhaven acute services building opens to patients.
• Late 2026: Batemans Bay Community Health due to finish.
• 2027: Eurobodalla Regional Hospital opens after operational commissioning; Moruya and Batemans Bay hospitals close; Shoalhaven's refurbishment of its existing buildings due to finish.