The University of South Australia is making plans for a new health precinct to be built alongside the new Royal Adelaide Hospital.

While a decision is far from final, the university’s interest is currently centred on the stretch of land between Montefiore Road and the under-construction South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute.

That land currently houses the metro rail control centre and Adelaide City Council’s skate park.

In response to a query from Indaily UniSA Vice Chancellor David Lloyd confirmed plans were underway for a “significant presence” near the new RAH.

“UniSA intends to have a significant presence on the north side of North Terrace; the nature and scale of the facility is very much a live discussion,” Lloyd told Indaily via an emailed statement.

UniSA’s chief operating officer Paul Beard told Indaily the uni was hoping to have a presence on the north side of North Terrace to accommodate increasing demand for health courses.

“It’s more about how we can best align some of our activities that need adjacency to a hospital – clinical placements for students, and those clinical training needs … simulation facilities down here, clinical labs and all those sort of things.

“The point about being on the north side of North Terrace is that’s where those other things are, so ideally we’d try and find a spot there somehow. And that’s really what we’ve started to come to bear in our thinking.

“All we’re saying is if we can try and find some adjacency to that health precinct that obviously makes even more sense.”

Beard said the university was looking at putting in new facilities within the next five years.

The university currently offers 20 undergraduate health programs including nursing, midwifery, pharmacy and physiotherapy.

The majority of these courses are taught at the university’s City East campus on the corner of North Terrace and Frome Road.

Beard said the City East site couldn’t grow any further to meet the growing demand for health programs.

“We’ve always been looking at it thinking how could we grow. We’ve got strong demand by high-quality students, there’s strong workforce need, good employment outcomes.

“We’ve got the need to grow to meet workforce need and student demand, but we don’t really have much space at all there to grow into.

“So when the hospital got announced down here and construction started, what we naturally did was say how can we accommodate some of that growth here in City West in the future.”

Indaily has been told by a senior chancellery source that the skate park site is currently seen by the university as the best place for any new development.

Beard said several parcels of land near the hospital were being considered.

“That (the skate park) is not the only bit of land in this precinct. There’s land that’s government controlled, there’s land that private developers own on the northern side.

“There’s the skate park, there’s the rail control centre which the government is going to relocate in the near future. There’s other parcels along there. So I don’t think I have to be specific about saying it’s any particular site.”

Much of the land around the new RAH is in the park lands, including the skate park.

However both sites are owned by the State Government and could be freely built on with government permission.

While the entire area up to the rail control centre is covered by the RAH Development Plan Amendment, the skate park is not.

Indaily understands that some concept designs have been prepared for the new facilities.

Health Minister Jack Snelling said he was aware of the plans but hadn’t been directly approached by the university. At this stage no government funding to support the project was on the table, he said.

“I don’t think they’ve spoken directly to me, but I do know that they have plans about allied health and situating down here and having basically a medical precinct around the area.”

The University of Adelaide has previously confirmed it plans to have a major presence at the new RAH.