Cape Town - The land on which the new GF Jooste Hospital will be rebuilt has been secured by the Western Cape Department of Health.
But exactly where the 550-bed hospital will be built would not be revealed by MEC of Health Nomafrench Mbombo on Thursday, who said the exact location was being withheld to avoid unnecessary objections that could delay the process even further.
In an exclusive interview with the Cape Argus, Mbombo said the department was satisfied with the size of the identified land to accommodate the new hospital.
“We think that it’s big enough to accommodate the regional hospital.
“Our engineers and architects are already looking into it… conceptualising what the hospital needs to have and what it needs to look like,” she said.
Mbombo said there was no open land big enough to build a hospital in Manenberg.
She admitted the builders would probably have to demolish some buildings first before beginning construction.
“The breakthrough is that we have finally identified a site. Experience has taught us that we don’t pre-empt anything until we have signed on the dotted line.
“We didn’t want a situation where people would object for political reasons.
“That’s why we are keeping quiet until we sign on the dotted line, which is probably before the end of the year. That’s why we have even put a budget for it,” she said.
In her budget speech in the provincial legislature last month, Mbombo said the business case involving the hospital had been given the nod by the national government.
Decommissioned in 2014, GF Jooste Hospital in Duinefontein Road was one of the busiest hospitals on the Cape Flats, and was the only hospital serving the Klipfontein area.
When it was closed down, the department promised to demolish it and rebuild a new one within three years.
While originally planned as a district hospital, Mbombo had since announced that a regional hospital would instead be built to accommodate the growing patient numbers and burden of diseases.
It was expected to take about five years to build the new hospital.
As part of the province’s Hospital Bed Plan – which forms part of Health care 2030 – Mbombo also confirmed that the rebuilding of the overburdened Helderberg Hospital (formerly Hottentots Holland) were afoot, with a new site secured.
Not only was the hospital old and mostly build with prefab materials, Mbombo said the hospital – which services the Metro East district such as Strand, Somerset West and Lwandle – was one of the facilities that were experiencing service pressures as the region was one of the fastest growing areas.
The new hospital was also likely to be a regional hospital.
Another part of the city that was due to have a new district hospital in the future was the Stellenbosch Arterial region, which was surrounded by Belhar, Bellville and Delft as these areas applied pressure on Tygerberg Hospital, which was a tertiary hospital.
Plettenberg Bay and George were also down for district hospitals due to growing populations in these regions and service pressures on surrounding hospitals
Cape Argus