Calvary is set to double its private hospitals. In Newcastle, IVF, abortion and assisted dying go with the sale

Doctors at Newcastle Private Hospital have been told that IVF, abortion, voluntary assisted dying, gender-affirming care, contraception, vasectomies and tubal ligation will end within weeks, once Catholic provider Calvary takes the hospital over.

It is the sharpest local edge of a national shift. Calvary, a Catholic not-for-profit, is set to buy 14 private hospitals from Healthscope, the operator that collapsed into administration in 2025. The deal would roughly double Calvary’s private hospital network across Australia. Catholic providers already run about 6 per cent of the country’s public and private hospitals.

Calvary confirmed earlier this month that the services will stop at Newcastle Private and Hunter Valley Private. Staff will be asked to work under the Code of Ethical Standards for Catholic Health and Aged Care Services, which rules out procedures such as abortion and sterilisation where preventing fertility is the only purpose.

Calvary has said that where it does not offer a service, it will work with the treating specialist on “appropriate pathways” elsewhere.

Who decides what a hospital offers?

Not the competition regulator. The ACCC is assessing whether the 14-hospital purchase would substantially lessen competition. Whether patients lose access to particular treatments is not part of that test.

The first piece of the expansion has already been cleared. In August, the ACCC approved Calvary’s separate purchase of Hobart Private Hospital, finding that without a realistic alternative buyer the hospital could stop operating as a private hospital at all. It also found that fertility treatment, surgical terminations, VAD and gender-affirming procedures were likely to end there whether or not the sale went ahead. The purchase makes Calvary the only major private overnight hospital operator in Hobart and Launceston.

In NSW, the hospitals also need a state licence transfer. The Premier and Health Minister Ryan Park have ruled out refusing it unless the services continue, saying they will be available elsewhere, including at public hospitals.

Where do patients go?

For IVF patients, the hardest part is the egg collection, which needs a hospital setting. Hunter IVF, beside Newcastle Private, is talking to other private hospitals about taking those procedures.

For dying patients the squeeze is tighter. Newcastle’s only public hospice sits in a Calvary-run hospital that does not allow VAD drugs on site, so patients who choose assisted dying must move to another bed, sometimes in another place. Newcastle Private and Hunter Valley Private have been offering beds for VAD where they can. When they stop, that pressure moves on to an already stretched public system.

What are doctors saying?

The divide is not over religion itself. The president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Dr Nisha Khot, has said the college has “no objection to Catholic ownership of hospitals”. Its concern is what happens to services that disappear.

Dr Veronica Knight of IVF Australia has called the decision “discrimination based on religious ethos”. Labor MP Mike Freelander, a doctor, has put the other side of it simply: “What’s the alternative?” Without a buyer, hospitals like Hobart Private faced closing as private hospitals altogether.

Has this happened before?

In 2024, the NSW Health Minister restored abortion services at Orange Hospital, a public hospital, after concerns about access. That was a public hospital, which the state runs. The Newcastle and Hunter Valley hospitals are private, and the NSW Government has chosen not to make the services a condition of the sale.