The outcome of years of arm-wrestling about whether to close PDH or not is on the whole to be welcomed.

For that, the members engaged in the diligent Health Service Service Community Engagement Committee, chaired capably by Mr Les Stahl, deserve our thanks.

Our hospital will retain day-time Emergency, and we can expect much-needed improvements to facilities at PDH. Overall health-care in the south of the vast Bega Valley Shire can be expected to be decent, thanks to a good local provision of private doctors and other health-care professionals and to the new public Bega hospital, assuming that the new facilities at Bega will be staffed by qualified resident experts and not depend on jerry-rigged locum rosters.

Even if most of us regret that maternity has been lost and Ambulances coming from the south will bypass PDH, we – as potential patients, but also as taxpayers – should be able to live with the compromise.

The outcome of years of debate and struggle with the health bureaucracy would have been a lot less acceptable had the local community not shown such wonderful engagement.

And this is the lesson that we should to take away: Simply criticising and saying that “they” ought to do this or that for us won’t do. We, the citizens, have to stand up for our interests. The fact that the local community engaged the authorities with such energy, imagination and persistence, fills me with a deep sense of pleasure about living in this district.

Wolfgang Kasper, Tura Beach