Rachel Stephen-Smith confirmed there was a dispute with Calvary over the length of an agreement to provide health services.

The current agreement between Calvary and the ACT government has 76 years remaining but the government wanted a new 25-year agreement.

Calvary's national chief executive, Martin Bowles, revealed this on Wednesday after the government refused to say why negotiations had stopped.

Ms Stephen-Smith said this was "one of the sticking points" but indicated there were more issues at play.

"Now their position, as put to us in November was, from our perspective, a very clear position on a couple of matters that we also held a clear and different position on," she said.

Mr Bowles said he had not received any communication from the government until Monday, when he was told about the forced acquisition, but Ms Stephen-Smith said she had acknowledged the receipt of the letter.

The Health Minister said after Calvary had made its decision clear the government explored whether a new northside hospital could be built elsewhere. She said if a hospital was built elsewhere the Calvary public hospital would not be able to continue operation.

"It is clearly understood that in the ACT we can't support three acute hospitals for the size of our jurisdiction, that wouldn't be efficient so building a hospital on a greenfield site would have also meant, at some point, dealing with the issue of Calvary public hospital and how we were going to manage that contract into the future," she said.

The ACT government had assembled a team over recent weeks to work on the hospital's transition but Ms Stephen-Smith said the government had only made the final decision recently.

"That decision was actually finally taken very recently and so I just really want to put to bed any view that we've been sitting on this decision for a long period of time," she said.

"We've been working through this decision over a period of time, very closely and very carefully. What we wanted to ensure that we did was to have everything in place so that staff could be immediately supported once they were advised."

MORE CALVARY TAKEOVER NEWS:

Chief Minister Andrew Barr said, in question time on Wednesday, cabinet had only reached a final decision on the acquisition in the "last week or so".

Ms Stephen-Smith acknowledged some staff at Calvary were upset about the acquisition but said she had also heard from people happy at the decision. Mr Bowles had said some staff were left in tears at the decision.

"We know that there will be staff in Calvary who will not support this decision and there will be staff within Calvary who will support this decision and the longer we leave them in limbo with some people pro and some people against the worse that will be for all those staff. That's why we've taken the decisions we have around the timeframe," she said.

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