Griffith University and the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct

The Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct at Southport, the co-located development of the Gold Coast University Hospital, the Griffith University Gold Coast campus, the Bond University health faculty, and the private health and the medical research facilities that the Queensland Government's health infrastructure investment and the university campuses have concentrated around the new hospital in the northern Gold Coast, creates the academic health centre model that the concentration of the hospital, the medical school, and the biomedical research creates for the quality of the health care, the medical education, and the clinical research that the combined environment sustains. The precinct's development, emerging from the construction of the Gold Coast University Hospital in 2013 as the catalyst for the broader precinct investment that the hospital's presence attracted, is one of the fastest growing health and education precincts in Australia and the economic development driver of the northern Gold Coast that the tourism and the construction have historically been.

The Gold Coast University Hospital, the 750-bed public teaching hospital that replaced the outdated Gold Coast Hospital as the principal tertiary health facility for the 600,000-person Gold Coast and the southeast Queensland regional catchment, provides the acute, the emergency, and the specialist services that the large coastal city with the significant tourist injury and the illness presentation rate alongside the permanent resident health needs requires. The hospital's emergency department, one of the busiest in Queensland, manages the complex mix of the tourist injury presentations from the beach and the theme park attractions, the trauma from the traffic and the outdoor recreation accidents, and the emergency medical and the surgical presentations of the permanent Gold Coast population that the hospital's catchment creates.

Griffith University's Gold Coast campus, the largest of the Griffith campuses and the one whose health sciences, business, and arts programs draw the majority of the university's enrolment from the Gold Coast and the southeast Queensland student market, provides the higher education anchor that the precinct requires for the student population and the research community that sustains the academic environment that the teaching hospital partnership creates for the clinical education and the research programs. The university's health science programs, delivered in the clinical education partnership with the Gold Coast University Hospital that the co-location makes uniquely efficient, train the medical, the nursing, the allied health, and the pharmacy graduates that the Gold Coast health system requires for the growing population's health needs.

The private health sector of the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct, including the John Flynn Private Hospital, the Pindara Private Hospital, and the specialist medical consulting and the allied health practices that cluster around the hospitals to provide the private health care alternative and the specialist referral services that the public hospital system depends on for the consultant specialist and the elective surgical capacity that the private sector absorbs from the public waiting lists, creates the health economy that the Gold Coast's ageing population and the health-conscious retirement community sustain as the premium health care demand that the private sector serves. The medical tourism element of the Gold Coast private health sector, attracting the international patients who come to the Gold Coast for the elective surgical procedures and the specialist consultations that the quality and the cost comparison with their home countries make competitive, adds the export dimension to the health economy that the Gold Coast health and knowledge precinct sustains.

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