The InfraShore Consortium, led by ABN Amro and Leighton Holdings subsidiary Thiess, has won the $1 billion tender for the public-private redevelopment of the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.

NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca said yesterday InfraShore was preferred tenderer with final contractual negotiations due for completion in October.

“The Royal North Shore project is the biggest health capital works project in NSW and will deliver new acute hospital and community health facilities of outstanding quality,” he said.

The project is also one of a number of major health projects nationwide, all of them worth over $1 billion, that aim to correct the chronic long-term lack of investment in health.

All the projects, such as the Marjorie Jackson Hospital in Adelaide and the Gold Coast and Sunshine coast hospitals in Queensland, have been aggressively sought by financiers, builders, facility managers and architects.

Alongside ABN Amro and Thiess, the other members of the winning InfraShore consortium include service providers Thiess Services and ISS Facility Services, Wilson Parking and design team BVN Architects.

The team will redevelop the site with two new facilities – a community health building due to be completed in mid-2011 and a huge new main hospital building of about 90,000 square metres, which is expected to finish in mid-2013.

InfraShore will also be able to develop private facilities on other parts of the site.

The new construction is expected to cost about $750 million and the total value of the public-private private partnership could exceed $1 billion.

Mr Della Bosca said the partnership with the private sector had enabled the architects and planners to draw on the “best ideas from around the world” and deliver an “expandable design that can grow and change in response to health care needs.”

State opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner welcomed the announcement.

But she criticised the “glacial pace” of government action on the proposals.

“Only the incompetent and inept state Labour government could have made so little progress after six years,” she said.

“Labour’s only achievement to date has been to delay completion of this project for four years, and blow the budget by $284 million.”

InfraShore’s project director, ABN Amro structured finance executive director Rob Ward, said the proposal delivered “a financing solution funded through both debt and equity that is value for money with a high degree of certainty as it is 100 per cent underwritten by ABN Amro.”

Thiess’s general manager NSW/ACT, Brendan Donohue, said the key was how services could be brought into the hospital.

“We would have liked to have done this earlier . . . we have been working on this for two years.”