Gold Coast Health: The Hospital and Health Services for a Growing City

The Gold Coast University Hospital, the $1.7 billion public hospital that opened at Southport in 2013 and that is one of the most significant and most modern public hospital facilities built in Queensland in the past generation, provides the Gold Coast with the public health infrastructure that the city's growing and ageing population demands. The hospital's 750-bed capacity, its co-location with the Gold Coast Private Hospital and the Griffith University Faculty of Health, and its designation as a major teaching hospital and trauma centre for the Gold Coast and surrounding region create the health precinct that the Gold Coast Health Service District's model of integrated care is built around.

The Griffith University medical school program, delivering the medical education and the clinical training for the medical graduates who will staff the Gold Coast and broader Queensland health system, is one of the medical education programs most closely integrated with a public hospital campus in Australia. The medical school's co-location with the Gold Coast University Hospital provides the clinical teaching environment that the evidence-based medical education approach depends on, with the student's exposure to the full spectrum of the hospital's caseload from the emergency department to the specialist inpatient units creating the breadth of clinical learning that the curriculum requires.

The mental health services of the Gold Coast Health Service District, including the acute inpatient mental health unit at the Gold Coast University Hospital and the community mental health teams that provide the ongoing support for the Gold Coast's significant population of people living with mental illness, manage the mental health burden that a city with the demographic characteristics of the Gold Coast, including the transient population, the substance use issues associated with the tourism economy, and the social isolation that can accompany the migration that brings people to the Gold Coast from elsewhere, generates in the service demand.

The private health sector on the Gold Coast, including the Pindara Private Hospital, the John Flynn Hospital, and the growing number of specialist day surgeries and outpatient facilities that the private health insurance penetration of the Gold Coast's population sustains, provides the elective surgery and the specialist outpatient services that the private patients whose insurance coverage and whose preference for the amenity of private care creates the market for. The private sector's management of the elective demand that the public system's capacity cannot meet creates the mixed health system that Australian metropolitan and large regional health depends on.

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