Sydney Adventist Hospital is the flagship of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist health care system in the South Pacific. This system reaches into 58 countries and employs 65,000 people in 161 hospitals and 313 clinics.
Healthcare is a core mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church throughout the world and the establishment of the fledging healthcare initiatives that ultimately resulted in the building of the Hospital were encouraged by Adventist Church leader Ellen White.
Sydney Sanitarium opened in Wahroonga on 1 January, 1903 with a bed capacity of 70 and was known as a ‘home of health’ and as a place where people learned to stay well. The original Hospital building was designed by Dr Merritt Kellogg, brother of Dr John Harvey Kellogg.
Demonstrating faith and providing expertise, compassion and healing, the Sanitarium became widely known as the ‘San’, and today, many years after its 1973 official name change to Sydney Adventist Hospital, it is still fondly referred to as ‘the San’ Hospital.
The Hospital was rebuilt in 1973 and became an acute care institution. Today, with 352 licensed overnight beds, it is the largest single campus private hospital in NSW and was the first private hospital in NSW to be accredited by the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards.
In 1986 the Hospital formalised their outreach work in third world countries amongst disadvantaged sick men, women and children by launching the HealthCare Outreach (HCO) Program with the Operation Open Heart inaugural trip to Tonga. Since then over 89 HCO trips to 9 countries have been made with over 2500 surgeries performed and lives saved. In 2007 the 21st anniversary of the first trip was celebrated. Surgeries have now been expanded to cover cleft palate defect repair, orthopaedic surgery and burns scar contracture repair.
In 2005 the innovative Hospital in the Home program commenced at the San.
In 2006 the San won the prestigious national Australian Private Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence (70 beds and over). The San also become home to the Southern Hemisphere’s first Dual Source Computerised Tomography Scanner in the same year.
A not-for-profit health care facility, 2,000 staff and 600 accredited medical officers provide services for more than 45,000 inpatients and over 155,000 outpatients annually at the San.
The San will continue to grow its services to provide world-class facilities, technology, and treatments in order to encourage best practice and attract expert, caring medical, nursing and allied health staff.
Caring for patients' needs was the motivation for the Sanitarium opening over 100 years ago and remains the first priority of Sydney Adventist Hospital today and this is reflected in the mission statement:
“Christianity in Action – caring for the body, mind and spirit of our patients, colleagues, community and ourselves.”
