Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you would have heard that the ACT Government and Calvary have done a bit of a hospital/hospice deal. ACT Government buys Calvary Hospital from the Little Company of Mary for $77m, and sells them Clare Holland House (a palliative care hospice) for $9m. Little Company of Mary have now announced plans to spend $45m building a new 75-bed Calvary Private hospital in Bruce. Story in The Canberra Times. Nothing on ABC News yet.
The new hospital will open the doors to its first stage, a day surgery centre, in 2012. When complete, the hospital will have four to six operating theatres, a 15-bed maternity unit, and up to 60 hospital beds. The final stage, an oncology unit, will be complete by 2018.
While the new private hospital is being built, Calvary Private will continue to provide services in the existing hospital building, by leasing space back from ACT Government for the existing private hospital beds.
Management at Calvary’s public and private maternity units have no further advice yet about how this might affect services in coming years – there are lots of planning approvals etc to be done before the new hospital plans can progress much further. But Maternity Coalition have written to the Calvary CEO to find out more.