Advisor sought

THE HEALTH Ministry is searching for an advisor to help with the public–private partnership (PPP) project to build a brand new university hospital in Bratislava that is to cost €250 million. The advisor is to secure broad financial, legal and technical consulting services in the next three years and advise the public procurement process to select an investor and an operator for the medical facility. The ministry announced the tender on September 26, with the order valued at €2.25 million without VAT. The deadline for submitting bids is November 4, the SITA newswire wrote.

“The public procurement to select an advisor is a long-planned step and another [that stems] from preconditions to create a platform for successful negotiations, and [it] signals to potential partners the preparedness to carry out this demanding and simultaneously exceptionally important project,” said Zuzana Čižmáriková, head of the communication department of the Health Ministry. She added that the project will significantly increase the quality of health- care provision, but it will also bring better possibilities for education and research in the health-care sector.

The ministry has already held one tender related to the hospital’s construction, in which it selected a consortium of two companies that wrote a feasibility study on the construction of the new hospital. The ministry paid the consortium more than €720,000 without VAT. Based on this study, the hospital should be completed in late 2017.

The hospital’s construction will be the first project in which the PPP scheme will be used in the health-care sector in Slovakia. The hospital, to be part of BioMedPark, is intended as a kind of replacement of the failed Rázsochy project, a state-of-the-art medical facility in Bratislava whose construction began under the communist regime in the 1980s.

So far 19 investors have showed interest in the project including J&T Real Estate, Svet Zdravia owned by Penta, Agel, Erste Group, ČSOB or ING Bank.