Perth’s new women’s and children’s hospital will be built south of the river at the Fiona Stanley Hospital precinct, WA Premier Mark McGowan has revealed.
The decision to base the hospital, to replace the ageing King Edward Memorial Hospital, away from the QEII precinct was made after the complexity of the build revealed there would be major disruptions for Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital patients and staff, and a delayed opening if it was built there.
In announcing the move, McGowan and WA Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson said the new site would allow for more obstetrics and gynaecology beds and neonatal cots.
Further upgrades to Osborne Park Hospital were also revealed as the government locked in $1.8 billion from the state budget surplus for the project, which Sanderson said could be built by 2029.
“The good thing is – and this is unlike other states – it’s fully funded, so it’s not going to be a debt burden on future generations,” McGowan said.
McGowan played down any savings from the project’s move south, but did say it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” cheaper.
He said the original site, to the north of G Block in the QEII centre, had been earmarked for decades as the location for a new women’s and children’s hospital once King Edward closed.
However, the planning assessments for the new hospital revealed it was “not the best site”, and the decision was made to build the hospital on greenfield land in the Fiona Stanley precinct in Murdoch.
“It will less disrupt existing services and patients and ensure that we can get it built more quickly, more efficiently, more affordably, on a site that is very easily accessed by transport, and close to Jandakot … so it’s easier for women arriving by Royal Flying Doctor Service to get to the hospital,” he said.
“Anyone driving into Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital will know it’s a busy place. You drive in there on any given day, [it’s] very hard to get parking … it’s just very busy, very hard to even get into the place.
“Building a brand-new hospital in the middle of that site was going to be extremely difficult, which is what the business case and the project definition plan have found.”
McGowan said building at G Block would have seen the timeframe for the new hospital’s construction blow out to as late as 2034, and would have entailed the removal of a wall from the existing hospital and the demolition of “a number of buildings”.
“And then finally, under the ground because it’s a brownfield site – it’s been in hospital for many decades – there’s some concern what might be actually underground, and therefore, how to, in an engineering sense, deal with all those issues,” he said.
Sanderson said the site at the Fiona Stanley Precinct was currently a car park, and the government would replace any parking that was displaced by the new hospital.
“It is critically important that we co-locate the women’s and newborns hospital to a tertiary hospital so that our sickest women have access to an ICU, which is what makes Fiona Stanley, this site, the obvious choice,” she said.
A significant upgrade for Osborne Park Hospital will see the development of a Family Birthing Centre, similar to the one at Fiona Stanley Hospital.
“This will ensure that women get maternity care and obstetric care and gynaecological care that they need closer to their home,” Sanderson said.
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