The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Cottage is a day program for teens with moderate to severe mental health issues. Photo: ACT Government.
Canberra’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Cottage is now expected to be relocated from the North Canberra Hospital to Erindale as the government continues its preparations for the new hospital.
It had previously been announced the service would be moved into a new purpose-built facility in Lyons in 2026, but that location and building type have changed.
“The best location [for the Cottage program] has been identified as Erindale,” Mental Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith informed Budget Estimates.
“We recognise, in terms of distance, it is a significant shift.”
A site in Erindale would need to be refurbished before the move could take place, instead of building a new facility on the southside.
Preliminary design planning has begun.
Ms Stephen-Smith said while Lyons had originally been the plan, it had run into some barriers.
“When we did some investigations on that, we realised [the site] wasn’t going to be large enough and didn’t quite work in terms of the parking and [other] facilities on site,” she said.
The location change comes as community consultation on the Northside Hospital project has yet to begin.
An ACT Government spokesperson confirmed to Region that the community consultation period had been moved from mid-2025 to towards the end of this year.
“Northside Hospital Project is in the early planning stages, undertaking extensive site investigations and due diligence as part of the master-planning process,” they said.
“The draft Clinical Services Plan has been completed. Consultation has started with staff, consumer reference groups and special interest groups, with broader community consultation on the master plan for the campus expected by the end of the year.”
Meanwhile, the government and the hospital’s former owner, Calvary Health Care, are continuing negotiations around just terms of compensation.
Ms Stephen-Smith was asked by Greens MLA Jo Clay about the status of a freestanding birth centre planned for the site, and whether it was being considered as part of the broader hospital development.
The Health Minister responded that she couldn’t say whether all of the funding required for the Northside Hospital was currently in the budget.
“But what I can say is there is a very significant provision in the budget of more than a billion dollars, and that the birth centre is now considered as part of this project.”
Ms Stephen-Smith also updated the Budget Estimates panel on the mental health short-stay and safe-haven models.
The short-stay services are still located in the Canberra Hospital’s old emergency department, but are only being opened when required.
“We do remain committed to a safe-haven-type model, a peer-led model, in the Canberra Hospital and we are continuing to look at the evaluations to understand the value of safe-haven services, and other distress intervention services, in the community,” Ms Stephen-Smith said.
There’s $1.79 million in the 2025-26 ACT Budget to support the operation of the Belconnen Safe Haven service, with $200,000 of that to be used to evaluate an expansion of the model.
