Minister for regional health Bronnie Taylor committed to add half-a-dozen new chairs for chemotherapy and renal patients to the hospital in addition to the beds at the service, on Thursday.

The commitment comes after a demand by Gunnedah mayor Jamie Chaffey to keep the service at the same size, which he said was 48 beds.

"The really important thing today is that these services are here, the funding's there, it will happen," she said.

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Cr Chaffey told the Leader that he welcomed the commitment to the new hospital - he just wished it had come sooner.

"It's been a long journey of pain right throughout the community to get where we should have been at the very start," he said.

"I think back to that time, 12 to 18 months ago, when clinical a services plan was being developed and ready for endorsement. If the community had have been able to see at that point what was signed off on by Hunter New England Health for the design of this hospital, we would have known 30 beds and we would have been able to speak up then. Now we've had to wait until this point, which is very much a lost time."

Nonetheless, he said council remains confused about how those beds will be delivered in the service.

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"I'm hearing from some organisations that there's some concern about the design. I think there probably is still some way to go for Health Infrastructure before it's endorsed and ready to go out for DA and construction to start," he said.

Minister Taylor defended her government's handling of the new hospital build, telling a press conference that "we've become really fixed on" bed numbers at the service, but it was the healthcare that really mattered.

"People were saying, 'oh, but you know, it's been downgraded' - it absolutely has not!" she said.

"This is exactly the same amount of beds that you've had that had been planned and looked at and assessed carefully with, in addition to renal chairs and chemotherapy chairs."

She said the average length of a hospital stay was shrinking, "because healthcare has evolved", with many services now provided at home or in non-hospital facilities.

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Member for Tamworth Kevin Anderson said the facility would include an expanded emergency department and double the capacity for operating theatres "to meet the future demand for hospital and community-based health services".

"I have been calling for the community to be front and centre throughout the planning stages for their new hospital and we have listened".

Ms Taylor didn't give an updated timeline for the facility, and didn't commit to opening both the renal and chemotherapy services at the same time as the rest of the hospital.

"We will get those up and running as soon as we can, when that redevelopment happens. And when it's safe to do so and when we have the staff," she said.

"We're not here to try and give you different times or give you exact times, we're all doing absolutely 100 times the best that we possibly can to make sure that those services are there."

In total the $53 million facility will contain 54 health spaces, Ms Taylor said.

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