Health Minister Jillian Skinner today announced the NSW Government’s health partnerships proposal to build upgraded hospitals at Maitland, Wyong, and Shellharbour hospitals, and to investigate a shared infrastructure solution at Bowral, will progress to the next stage.

“These partnerships are about building bigger and better hospitals for our local communities where they can continue to access free public health but in better facilities with more services and extra clinical staff,” Mrs Skinner said.

“That is why this is such an important process to go through.”

An Expression of Interest (EOI) process for non-government hospital operators to build and run several regional hospitals was launched on Thursday 15 September. Submissions from interested parties closed on Friday 14 October 2016.

“We received an excellent response from hospital operators for the Maitland, Wyong, Bowral and Shellharbour projects,” Mrs Skinner said.

“Goulburn will not be progressed as there was not sufficient interest received to give the NSW Government confidence that better outcomes could be achieved. As promised, if we cannot secure better outcomes, the projects will be built traditionally and construction will begin this term.

“We will continue with the other projects to test that the EOI responses offer robust proposals that will benefit the community whilst continuing to deliver access to free public healthcare.”

These projects will now move to the evaluation stage, which involves structured negotiations to discuss key government positions, and is expected to be complete by early 2017.

Under the health partnerships approach, successful operators for Wyong, Shellharbour and Maitland would construct the hospitals then run them on behalf of the NSW Government, with bigger and better facilities and more nurses and doctors.