“About twenty firms applied for the call for tenders and three of them were pre-selected, explains Alain Puenté, the president of the community of municipalities of the Pyrenees Haut-Garonnaises. The final jury met at the end of 2022 and the architectural firm Studio K was finally selected.The project for this new nursing home will be architecturally functional, sober and will use traditional materials, giving pride of place to wood and with stone on the facade. The building in Luchon will have an area of 850 m2 and the remote health center in Saint-Mamet, 350 m2″. The architectural firm carried out the final arbitrations with the health professionals, in order to verify that the project corresponds to their needs. “The copy was delivered at the end of April, the detailed preliminary project will be completed by the end of the year and then we will have a year or even a year and a half of work. The care home should therefore be operational by the end of the first half of 2025.” Located on the site of the old cynodrome, it will then accommodate four general practitioners, four nurses, a cardiologist, a gynecologist, an ophthalmologist, an osteopath, two speech therapists, two orthoptists, a psychologist, the home nursing service, the SSIAD, but also a technical platform around radiology as well as an emergency room. “There will be two sites, the main one, in Luchon, and a remote site in Saint-Mamet, continues the president of the CCPHG. We will only proceed with the construction of the remote site when we are sure that it will be well occupied. We are on a project at 3.5 million euros, we hope that all of our partners will be with us, Europe, the state, the Occitanie Region and the department, in order to complete the financing. They are already by our side for the work of the transitional health center which will open on September 1, in Montauban-de-Luchon”.
A project so beneficial for the Aranese
A project awaited by a territory suffering from the lack of doctors and specialists. “We are going to be able to offer a quality care offer, concludes Alain Puenté. It is a large-scale fight and a fundamental issue for the territory but also, beyond the Luchon area. We are going to see what collaboration we can put in place with the Val d’Aran, for example. The arrival of the Saint-Exupéry clinic, with the dialysis center, can be an asset for the Aranese who are forced to travel to Lleida.”