08
STATE
BUILDING A NEW
HOSPITAL FOR SYDNEY
R
ecently, I visited
the construction
site of Sydney’s
newest hospital
with NSW Health
Minister Jillian Skinner.
Mrs Skinner and I announced Australia’s leading
healthcare provider, Healthscope, had been chosen as the
preferred operator to design,
build and maintain the new
Northern Beaches Hospital on a
6.5 hectare site at Frenchs Forest.
The hospital will be the first
built on a greenfield site in Sydney in 20 years, and will deliver the best possible care to both
public and private patients.
Let me assure you that public patients will access services at the new hospital in exactly
the same way they do at any other public hospital in NSW.
It will be a modern, nine
storey hospital, with 1,400 car
spaces and a helipad – and will
employ 1,300 staff, increasing
the workforce by 400.
There will be 488 hospital beds, including more public beds, bringing the total number of beds across the Northern Beaches to 554. This bed in-
crease will be supported by 14
operating theatres and a large
50-space integrated emergency department, state-of-the-art
intensive care and critical care
units, and modern inpatient
mental health facility.
Partnering with Healthscope, one of Australia’s leading health care providers, is a
smart solution and will allow
Sydney’s newest hospital to be
built faster, at less cost to the
taxpayer.
The Northern Sydney Local
Health District will enter into
a long-term partnership with
Healthscope to provide public
patient services over the next 20
years. At the end of that contract
period, the public portion of the
hospital can be handed back to
the NSW Government at no additional cost. Healthscope then
has a further 20 years to provide
services to private patients, before the remaining part of the
hospital can also be returned.
Public and private patients
will both be winners under this
model. Public patients will no
longer have to travel out of the
Northern Beaches to other hospitals across Sydney such as
Westmead for higher-order
health care, while privately-insured patients will have easier access to this higher-order
health care in a beautiful, stateof-the-art facility.
This Public Private Partnership will deliver more choice
for patients, better services and
a modern facility that is expected to open in 2018.
The project will be valued
at about $1 billion, including
$400 million in road upgrades
that the NSW Government will
complete before doors open in
2018. Additionally, it will also
provide an economic boost to
NSW, with 700 jobs created
during construction.
We have all been waiting
a long time for this announcement and next year we will start
seeing the full scale construction of the Northern Beaches
project.
I am proud that we are delivering on our promise to provide
world-class health care facilities acro 727