5 communities use several hospitals

A safe, affordable, efficient and equitable distribution of hospital and related service-facilities in relation to the community, is the 'raison d'etre' of a managed health and hospital service-infrastructure.

Many if not most Australian communities use several hospitals. [1] and [2] respectively show the percentage of demand supplied by various hospitals. to the Bankstown [1] and Greater Taree [2] communities.

In the case of Greater Taree, eleven percent of patients travelled between 100 and 200 kilometres from family and friends for their public hospital care. Another 26 % of patients used private hospitals most of which are located outside the subregion and a significant percentage more that 100k distant.

In the case of Bankstown, a middle ring suburb of Greater Sydney, more than 40% of patients traveled more than 20 minutes drive from their communities for hospital care in medicine and surgery.

[1] % of Bankstown's met demand supplied by hospital

[2] % of Greater Taree met demand supplied by hospital

While most of a community's demand for hospital care can be met by a local district hospital¹, some percentage, very approximately 10-15%, has to be met by distant referral hospitals since low demand, high risk, high cost, highly specalised, procedures cannot be supplied by every hospital either safely, or economically. Such services are located at sub-regional or regional referral hospitals.

^{1. Where this hospital is one of a managed network which has a complement of specialist medical staff requiird to cover an average populace of 175,000 - 250,000.}