Member for Gilmore Joanna Gash last week welcomed Coalition plans to restore hospital boards in New South Wales and Queensland.

She said patients and staff at hospitals throughout the region were sick and tired of decisions being made by a "huge and growing bureaucracy" in Sydney.

She said hospitals in Shellharbour, Nowra, Milton and Batemans Bay all had their "fair share of problems" and it was time to "stop the rot".

"It's time our hospitals were given back to us," Mrs Gash said.

The NSW Liberal/National Coalition also plans to remove the State Government's "failed" area health services and to create smaller health districts with boards that put patients first and re-engage medical experts.

Member for South Coast Shelley Hancock said the Coalition Government's health management policy would "return power back to the people".

However the move has been rejected by the NSW Nurses Association which has said modern healthcare is "too complex" to be managed by hospital boards.

The association has accused Coalition politicians at both a state and federal level of 'trotting out' the hospital board idea without tackling the real issues of funding, staffing and skills.

"The hospital board idea is a return to a system we had 20 years ago which provided no more solutions to the problems confronting the health system," NSWNA general secretary Brett Holmes said last week.

"In fact it created a whole raft of extra parochial pressures which diverted scarce resources away from where they could do the most good in an integrated health care system," Mr Holmes said.

"The real issues are better funding and adequate staff with the right skills properly distributed across and integrated and networked health system - a system that can provide a level of both expert and specialist health services, properly balanced between treatment and preventative care for the whole community."

Mr Holmes said hospital boards, in the past, had focused 'unrealistically' on providing the full range of services for their local community despite the fact there was neither the staff or the funding to do this.

He said such boards also had a tendency to interfere in the day to day management of hospitals and community health.