THE newly renovated consulting rooms at the Proserpine Hospital welcomed the first patients last Thursday.

The purpose-built speciality rooms are individually fitted out with different speciality equipment including ones which will cater to gynaecological and optometry procedures.

Director of Nursing at the Proserpine Hospital Nicola Young said a triage room and consulting rooms were included.

"The triage room will bring people through to the emergency department,” she said. "The really sick usually come by ambulance so these are the walking wounded.

"The other consulting rooms are specialist.

"We have a gynaecologist that comes up from Mackay weekly.

"The eye room tends to work a lot more from our own doctors as in this area a lot of manual workers get little bits of metal in their eyes and welding flashes.”

Four rooms are now finished at the end of the first stage of the upgrade and, by the end of the project, the hospital will have a total of seven rooms.

A new waiting room and bathrooms have also been completed at the end of stage one.

Ms Young said the build so far had been completed on time.

Ms Young said there had been an increased demand for speciality services and the building of new consulting rooms was a reaction to a community need.

"The emergency department is something growing in every area so it's all about the demand of the community,” she said.

"It's a little bit of pain at the moment but it will be good gain at the end.”

Money that has been donated to the hospital by community organisations and private donors has been used to fit out the consulting rooms with top class built-in patient monitoring stations.

"We wouldn't have got them without donations from the community,” Ms Young said.