The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority is seeking a private investor to build and operate a $90-million outpatient facility at the Vancouver General Hospital, where it will become one of the largest acute care facilities in the country contracted to the private sector.
Authority spokesperson Clay Adams says the 34 000-square-foot Academic Ambulatory Care Centre, which is expected to be completed by 2005, will be leased for 20 to 30 years, after which the health authority will take it over. At least half of the space will be leased by the authority; other tenants will include UBC's medical school and specialists. It is also expected to include some commercial space.
The centre will bring the hospital's walk-in services, including specialty clinics, laboratories and diagnostic imaging, under one roof. Ninety specialists with offices near the hospital have expressed some interest in moving into the new facility.
The authority says the deal will help it because a private developer will pay all up-front construction and maintenance costs. “The expectation is that they will be responsible for construction,” says Adams, “and they will also assume the ongoing operation and maintenance costs, which would be anything from the heating and cooling to possibly housekeeping staff.”
But contracting out service jobs, such as security and laundry positions, poses a problem for Mike Old, a spokesperson for the Health Employees Association, the province's largest health care union. He argues that health care deals with the private sector are “driven by ideology, not by a good business plan.”
Adams disagrees. “This means that we can move forward fairly quickly and we don't assume the up-front cost. Over the long term, yes, we own the building and there is a cost to it, but a private company can assume depreciation on a leased building, which we can't do.”
More private deals are in the offing. Ontario's William Osler Health Centre has presented a request for proposals to 4 private consortia for the construction of a new 608-bed hospital in Brampton, Ont. The private bidders will be expected to “design, build, finance, operate, property manage and maintain” the new public facility, which would open by the end of 2005. — Heather Kent, Vancouver