A hospital is a hospital and that’s what it should be called: Orange Base Hospital, Orange General Hospital, Orange Hospital, take your pick. Anything other than ‘health service’. Now, to put a cat among the pigeons, it looks as though the name doesn’t comply with NSW Health’s policy directive that clearly says: “Where a facility primarily provides acute in-patient services, the term ‘Hospital’ must be clearly designated in its name. Example: Blacktown Hospital.”

The directive further says: “While there is no impediment to administratively including a Hospital facility in a broader operational structure such as a ‘health service’, ‘cluster’ or ‘campus’, the Hospital name must not be completely subsumed within the broader administrative nomenclature. Example: X Hospital, not X Health Service…”

And there’s more: “Sites which contain a hospital facility should clearly display the ‘Hospital’ name at the entrance to the site, ensure it has prominence in its own right and is not made subordinate to administrative nomenclature such as ‘district’, ‘network’, ‘health service’. There is no impediment, however, to also including the latter on signage. Examples: Wyong Public Hospital A facility of Central Coast Local Health District, Bathurst Hospital Bathurst Health Service.” So there you go. Orange Hospital MUST be called a hospital according to NSW Health. The way it is now most people are confused, including the Sydney press, which calls it Orange hospital, and locally it gets different names. Police mostly refer to it as Orange hospital when talking to the VKG police radio base at Tamworth but if they call it health service, the base asks what that is and where is it. The local media has a bet each way, hospital and/or health service while the directional signs in Orange use ‘hospital’ rather than ’health service’ so, really, somebody should now make the change.

A Senate committee will look into the use of gophers to see whether tighter regulations are needed to slow dare-devil owners. Alarming accident statistics collected by Monash University showed 62 people were killed in a 10-year period and 442 people taken to hospital with injuries. Nationals Senator John Williams began the push for tougher rules for the scooters after one knocked over his wife Nancy and seriously injured her hip.

In Orange some of the more daring believe they’re Formula 1 drivers as they tear along the footpath in Summer Street, zig-zagging in and out of pedestrians and dodging shoppers in supermarkets while there’s been cases of people falling off while heading home from the pub.

People don’t need a licence, insurance or regular eyesight or health checks to get behind the wheel of one of these things but maybe they soon will before we all become an accident statistic.

Have you noticed impatient pedestrians waiting to cross the street feverishly pressing the button to try to change the traffic lights faster? Ratatatat...ratatatat. The bottom line is it makes no difference whatsoever. You can push as many times as you like but the lights react to just one press so standing there belting the daylights out of the button doesn’t do a thing.