Flora Clinic – where it all began
Flora Clinic is one of the best-known hospitals in the area, but was once just an empty piece of land.
Life Flora Hospital was once an empty piece of land bought by a married couple, Raymond and Hester Oliver, who started developing the Flora Clinic in 1970.
Roodepoort Record had the honour of sitting down with Hester while she told the story of how Flora Clinic came to light and how her husband, Raymond, built it up.
In 1970, the couple thought it best to invest and buy the piece of land where Flora Clinic now stands, without knowing what they wanted to develop. They bought the land for only R5 000, which was an arm and leg back in those days. After a while, they began developing a maternity home, and slowly built up Flora Clinic by recruiting shareholders who started to invest.
Their next step was to decide to build the hospital with the help of the architects from Neill Powell Neill Inc, who drew up the plans for the original Flora Hospital.
The clinic started out with 54 beds and three theatres, two for surgical cases and one for maternity cases. There was an X-ray department and later a catheterisation laboratory. Within a few years of opening, the demand for maternity facilities outgrew the small clinic and the maternity section was abandoned in favour of an expanded surgical unit. Adjacent to a major shopping complex and the N1 concrete highway, the clinic was in a prime position for expansion.
Due to its success and the increase in demand for beds in the area in 1984, they decided to redesign and rebuild the single storey clinic that comprised 50 beds into a modern, luxury 90-bed private surgical clinic that linked with the existing clinic.
In 1989, the Roodepoort Record published an article on the biggest and most popular hospital, namely the Flora Hospital. It was known to have “the largest theatre complexes of any hospital in the country, three intensive care units, maternity and X-ray facilities, and neurology and cardiology facilities supported by the very latest equipment”.
Flora Clinic, which started out as a village hospital, with the original aim of a 500-bed hospital, has grown beyond its founders’ wildest expectations and offers some of the best medical technology, both then and now.
In 1997, the couple made the decision to sell the ‘one of the best’ 319-bed hospitals to the Afrox Healthcare Group, which has remained the owner of Life Flora Hospital to this day.
