When a transplant patient was moved to a different ward at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in January, staff told her the transplant unit was simply undergoing renovation. What she was not told was that the ward was at the centre of a deadly mould outbreak that had already claimed lives. That detail, it turns out, stayed buried in ten boxes of documents until journalists dug it out.
Sensitive health records obtained by 7News reveal three deaths and seven confirmed cases of fungal infection inside RPA's ward nine, where organ transplant patients were receiving care between October and December last year. Two deaths are linked to an aspergillus cluster; a third transplant patient died from a separate mould infection. Six additional aspergillus cases at the hospital have also been recorded.
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park has offered an apology to the families of those who died, but has stopped well short of accepting that the public was failed by a lack of transparency. "There is in no way a sense of cover-up or not informing the community," Park told reporters. When pressed on why there had been no public disclosure until documents surfaced, he acknowledged: "I can see how people from retrospectivity could say well the community should have immediately been informed."
His explanation for what counts as public notification raised eyebrows. Park said hundreds of people had been informed, citing "cleaners, orderlies" as part of that count. That framing will strike many as a stretch, given that the patients most at risk, and their families, were not given a clear account of what was happening on the ward.
NSW Health's Deb Willcox stressed that different fungi were responsible for different cases, noting: "There are multiple types of fungi that can lead to an infection." She also, perhaps less reassuringly, suggested that mould incidents of this kind are an expected part of managing an ageing hospital network. "This will happen from time to time," Willcox said. For families who lost loved ones in a ward they trusted to be safe, that framing offers cold comfort.
The mould problem is not the only environmental concern at RPA. Staff have raised alarms about a significant pigeon infestation at the facility, with waste reportedly entering exhaust fans and potentially circulating through the building's ventilation. The footage obtained by 7News shows pigeon droppings on surfaces inside the hospital, including on a chair.
Shadow health minister Sarah Mitchell argues the issues at RPA are not an anomaly but a symptom of a wider failure to maintain the state's hospital infrastructure. "We're talking about pest infestations, leaking pipes. This is systemic and it's right across New South Wales," she said. Minister Park, for his part, acknowledged that hospitals across the network are in varying states of condition and age, an admission that does little to refute Mitchell's broader point.
There is a legitimate and uncomfortable tension at the heart of this story. On one hand, health authorities have a defensible reason to involve expert panels before going public with infection information, particularly in hospital settings where premature or poorly framed disclosures can cause panic or complicate clinical management. Australia's Department of Health and state equivalents routinely rely on structured expert review processes for exactly these situations.
On the other hand, the argument for transparency is just as strong. Patients in that ward, and their families, had a reasonable expectation of being told the truth about the environment in which life-saving treatment was taking place. Telling someone their ward is "under renovation" when it is actually contaminated is not discretion; it is a failure of the basic trust that makes a hospital system function. The Health Care Complaints Commission exists precisely to investigate matters of this kind, and it would be surprising if these events did not come before it.
What this episode reveals, more than anything, is a structural problem that no single minister or bureaucrat created overnight. Ageing hospital infrastructure, chronic underfunding of maintenance, and institutional cultures that default to managing information internally rather than openly: these are problems shared across every Australian state and territory. They deserve a serious, evidence-based response, not reassurances that mould in a transplant ward is simply something that happens from time to time. Patients, and the public, are owed better than that.