The government has repeatedly postponed a decision on whether and how the state will finance the construction of Tallinn's new hospital — a medical campus planned for Lasnamäe — and its long-term operating costs.

According to Karl Sander Kase (Isamaa), Tallinn's deputy mayor for social affairs and health, the current situation has become one where the hospital network development strategy already accounts for the new medical campus, yet funding remains unresolved.

"We now have a situation where the national government has seemingly approved a document that anticipates the new medical campus, but no decision or discussion has been held about where the funding for the new campus will come from. This has been repeatedly postponed. Initially, the discussion was supposed to take place in February, then in April and now we can only hope it will happen sometime in May," Kase said.

The deputy mayor noted that the city has proposed to both the prime minister and the minister responsible for the sector that the costs related to constructing the hospital be divided proportionally — 60 percent to be covered by the state and 40 percent by the city.

"But it's important to consider that the city will incur real costs even before we begin building the new medical campus. This includes the design and construction procurement processes, which are significant financial expenses. If we were to establish a joint hospital with the state, it would make no sense for Tallinn alone to bear the preparatory costs for a campus where the majority stake belongs to the state. That's definitely not acceptable to us," Kase explained.

The city is also waiting for the government's position on how the long-term funding of the medical campus will be handled.

"We still don't have a position from the national government on this, even though discussions began back in August," deputy mayor Kase said.

Architects: tender conditions ignore expert recommendations

The Estonian Association of Architects (EAL) and the Estonian Association of Construction Consulting Companies (EKEL) requested that the city extend the deadline for the design procurement, which was originally set for May 5. The reason was the absence of an international expert review among the reference materials, which would have assessed the quality of the spatial solutions proposed in the preliminary design.

Aet Ader, president of the Estonian Association of Architects, recalled that the announcement of the design procurement in August came as a surprise.

"The current Tallinn city government's coalition agreement states that further design work should be procured in cooperation with the Estonian Association of Architects. When we noticed in August that a procurement for further design had already been announced, the association approached the Tallinn Hospital Foundation to request negotiations on the design terms, as it was clear to us that the spatial quality of the preliminary design was poor," Ader said.

She cited an example where the building — roughly the size of two Ülemiste shopping centers — lacks enough entrances and navigating inside would be overly complicated.

"For instance, while the building is planned to have a main entrance, it would make sense for such a large structure — 186,000 square meters — to have multiple access points," the EAL president explained.

"The Finnish expert review also pointed out how difficult it would be for people to navigate the building. For example, it's not intuitively clear where the elevators are located. In fact, the elevators and staircases are tucked away behind corners," Ader noted.

Deputy Mayor Kase said that two expert reviews have now been added to the procurement, and the deadline has been extended to May 29 due to the changes. The second review was commissioned independently by the city.

"The proposals and conclusions from the expert reviews have been taken into account in the procurement documents, which is why the deadline was extended. If they had simply been added as annexes, there would have been no need for an extension," Kase said.

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