The $400 million hospital, promised before the 2011 state election, is one of five that Health Minister Jillian Skinner announced on Thursday is set to be operated under a public-private partnership.

Ms Skinner announced in question that time she had invited expressions of interest from private and not-for-profit operators to build and run the hospitals.

“The desire of the government is to ensure we can get really big, further advanced hospitals for those communities with extra services that they don’t have now,” she said.

“There’s the capacity to provide additional add-ons, things that might include aged-care, co-located primary health care and even medi-hotels.”

Ms Skinner said public patients would have access to “every service that a private patient has access too”.

“In fact they will be state-of-the-art high-tech, better than they have access to now,” she said.

“These are not private hospitals, these are hospitals involving the non-government sector which will provide services under contract to the state government.

“You’ll get the same access to quality service.”

Labor has long speculated that the government planned to build the new hospital under a public-private partnership, and Maitland MP Jenny Aitchison said the announcement was a “betrayal”.

“It goes towards further distrust of this government,” she said.

“How can you trust someone who first says we're going to build an additional hospital, then says were going to close the existing hospital, and then now after five years of asking it comes clean and says it’s actually a public-private partnership.

“We want to know how many beds and the services provided, will it have oncology, palliative care, the point is really they have been tricky and deceptive on this throughout the whole time.”

The new hospital, planned for a site at Metford, was initially proposed as a 450-bed hospital, but since then there has been concerns the scope of the operation had been reduced.

On Thursday Ms Skinner said the hospital would be “round about that” but could “vary up or down”.

“It’s really now more about how many patients and how many occasions of patient care you can provide.”