Netcare consolidated its Union and Clinton hospitals into a single 427-bed, 42,915m² facility in Alberton, designed for both everyday care and pandemic-mode operation.
Consolidating two hospitals into one
Netcare Alberton Hospital brings together two older CBD hospitals, the Union and the Clinton, which had each expanded piecemeal over decades until further growth on their original sites was no longer possible. Netcare chose a 52,334m² greenfield site within a kilometre of the original facilities, on the edge of the Newmarket precinct, and worked with A3 Architects Johannesburg on a 427-bed hospital with 13 theatres and 135 specialised ICU/HC beds and cots.
Planning ran from a 2015 site visit through Netcare board approval in 2017 to site handover in November 2019, and the design was reassessed during the 2020 COVID lockdown to strengthen air flow, patient separation and clean/infected zoning. A value-engineering process in 2019 trimmed roughly 4,500m² from the design, bringing the hospital's area-per-bed figure below that of Netcare's Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital benchmark despite the facility's scale.
"At 104m² per bed, Netcare Alberton is one of the most space-efficient hospitals of its kind in the Netcare group."
Spoormaker's role
Spoormaker & Partners was the mechanical engineer, specifying a VRF air-conditioning system selected after Netcare's internal engineering division modelled several configurations against operating cost data from other hospitals in the group, alongside HEPA-filtered ICU air handling and four laminar-flow theatres.