Countdown until the future Josep Trueta hospital becomes a reality. Salut's forecast is that the new campus, which will occupy an area of 193,000 square meters in Salt and Girona - the equivalent of approximately 27 times the old Camp Nou - and which will cost between 500 and 600 million euros, can be inaugurated in the year 2030.
This is the date and cost being considered by the Health Minister, Manel Balcells, who this morning attended the presentation of the functional care plan for the future campus. A plan, the result of a participatory process between doctors, nurses and users of the Trueta and Santa Caterina de Salt hospitals, that outlines what the spaces in which professionals will work and patients will be cared for will be like: from the emergency room, to the critical area, passing through the surgical or maternal and child areas.
It is already known that the new hospital, when it opens its doors, will do so with 31 operating rooms (today, between the current Trueta and Santa Caterina there are 19), with 134 admission boxes (today there are 84) and with 791 beds ( 125 more) that, in some areas, such as mother and child, will all be in individual rooms.
It is unknown, for now, how beds will be arranged in other areas of the hospital, although there are more and more voices from the healthcare field that are betting on hospitals with individual rooms and more, after Covid.
This was claimed a few days ago by cardiologist Ramon Brugada, at the press conference held every six months by the Health Campus Observatori in which the progress of the project was detailed.
This was also indicated today by the head of the Technical Office of the Health Campus, Maria Josep López Dolcet, and the head of the Trueta Hospital Emergency Service, Àngels Gispert, who has pointed out the need to have more individual rooms in the next ten years .
Of the 193,000 square meters of the future campus, 150,000 will be new construction. The rest is the building of the Santa Caterina Hospital in Salt, which will become part of that large health complex into which a campus must be converted, which will house the tertiary reference hospital for one million people.
The new campus represents a 73% growth in healthcare space in relation to the current Trueta and Santa Cterina, which dates back to the 1950s and has been outgrown for years. This large tablet of 193,000 square meters also includes a land reserve of 17,000 m2 more to meet the growth needs of the complex in the future.
With the presentation today of the hospital functional plan, Salut lays the foundations for the definitive architectural project. Previously, a contest of ideas must be held in which the Department of Health would begin to work on it between February and March of next year. It will do so once Salt initially approves the modification of the partial plan for the entire sector in which the future hospital center must be built.
In these urban planning procedures, Salt is slightly more advanced than Girona. Its mayor Lluc Salellas explained today that he expects to have ready the urban project to transfer the land to Salut "by 2024".
Regardless of this, Balcells has stated today that Salut will advance the procedures and will not wait for the land to be received by the two town councils to move forward with the project.
"Theoretically we should wait to receive these lands; but we will move forward and move forward with the next step, the competition of ideas," the Health Minister explained this afternoon.
This was precisely one of the demands made a few days ago by the Health Observatory, the organization promoted by doctors that periodically reports on the evolution of the project. The doctors asked Salut not to rest on its laurels and to start working on the ideas competition even though the land had not been completely transferred.
The competition of ideas that will stipulate from the functional plan what the spaces of the future health center should be, will take about three or four months. Once the contest is resolved, the executive project will be put out to tender, prior to the start of the works.
Balcells estimates that the work, from the laying of the first stone, could last between three and three and a half years and that work is being done with the idea that the campus can be a reality in 2030.
The head of Salut points out that this will be "one of the two most important projects" in health matters in Catalonia in the coming years. The other will be that of the new Clínic hospital.
The future health campus will also include the faculties of Medicine and Nursing as well as the research part of the Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Girona (Idibgi). The university is finalizing its functional plan. The rector of the UdG, Quim Salvi, emphasizes that the concentration in the same space for assistance, teaching and research "will generate very positive synergies."
