The Beacon Medical Group will be working with 16-20 banks to secure funding for the co-located hospitals it plans to build in Dublin, Limerick and Cork, its commercial director said yesterday.
Pauline Cullen was speaking after the company announced it had got the go-ahead from An Bord Pleanála to build one of them – a 183-bed private hospital on the grounds of Limerick Regional Hospital. It has already got clearance from An Bord Pleanála to build a second on the grounds of Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and is awaiting a decision from the planning appeals board on its application to build the third one adjacent to Cork University Hospital.
Ms Cullen said contracts for the hospitals had to be signed off by the HSE and the Department of Health before the Beacon Medical Group could seek finance to build them but she said the company was “confident of achieving funding”.
She said Beacon would be dealing with a lot more banks in the current climate than might have been the case before as each bank won’t take on as much debt. “We will work with 16-20 banks,” she said.
If contracts are signed quickly and finance is secured in the next few months, the hospital in Limerick will be completed in 2012, she said. It is expected to cost up to €250 million.
The Government announced the co-location plan in 2005 and said then that they would be built on the grounds of 10 public hospitals to free up 1,000 private beds but some of them are unlikely to go ahead as tax breaks for private hospitals which haven’t reached a certain stage were abolished in the recent budget.