Italian hospital PPP brought back to life

The Novara New Teaching and Research Hospital in Piedmont, Italy, will be brought to tender for the second time in the coming days, IJGlobal has learnt.

The €320 million ($338m) PPP project was put on hold in 2020 for a variety of unconfirmed reasons but remains an important project to the Italian government and the Piedmont region, sources close to the project maintain.

Once the tender is relaunched, interested parties will have 3 months in which to submit a bid, with a preferred bidder projected to be announced in Q1 2024.

The facility will have 3 tranches of funding:

• Italian government – about €95.36 million
• Piedmont regional authority (Regione Piemonte) – about €5.28 million
• private partner – €219.64 million

This was not the first time that the project experienced delays – it was first launched in February 2019 but was put on stand-by after it failed to get authorisation from Italy's central government, which is to provide a portion of funding for the new hospital. It was then slated to be relaunched in H2 2020, but this never materialised.

The availability-based healthcare contract will have a 30-year tenor, including a 4-year construction period.

The 700-bed Novara hospital site will comprise:

• hospital – 130,287m²
• university facility – 14,666m²
• mother and children medical centre – 13,411m²
• services building – 12,435m²
• business incubator – 1,209m²
• underground parking – roughly 88,000m² with capacity for 3,100 vehicles.

Advisers to Regione Piemonte are:

• Ernst & Young – financial
• SLT – legal
• Rina – technical

Hospital Novara was contacted for comment but did not reply by the time of publication.