The Royal Melbourne Hospital, Victoria’s first Hospital, is proud and excited to bring you Opera in the Market 2008. Now in its ninth year and bigger and better than ever, we invite you to our flag ship event.

The Royal Melbourne Hospital is the cornerstone of Melbourne Health, Victoria’s second largest health service serving a population of nearly 1,000,000 people living in Melbourne's northern and western metropolitan region and providing a range of specialist services to all Victorians.

Last year we cared for 105,000 inpatients, provided 670,000 outpatient appointments, saw 55,000 people in our Emergency Department and performed 12,000 operations, as well as educating and training the next generation of clinical specialists and undertook over 680 research projects.

One of our leading specialists recently commented ‘1000 miracles happen every day at Royal Melbourne’. This statement sums up the passion with which our staff pursue findings to enhance patient care – many of these ’miracles’ happen on the wards, in our emergency and surgical departments – and especially in laboratories.

These miracles often lead to a direct benefit to patients, but just as often, each miracle is a single step along a continuous path to discovery and innovation.

Research is critical to a healthy future and a healthy community – to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. Teams of researchers have worked tirelessly over the decades to improve our lives developing effective treatments for heart disease, diabetes, polio, cancer, and these wonderful people will continue to do so into the future.

Linda Sorrell - Chief Executive, Melbourne Health