Well found JM. 
Funnily enough, I did write in my reply that I wondered if "Intermediate" was a ward, but I removed it. 
One of our rootschat members is/was a nurse in Brisbane and I was hoping she would spot this thread.
Yes JM, I thought that a private room would be just that - private. An intermediate room might have 4 or 6 beds (for example) and a shared bathroom, and public might have dozens of beds on a ward and shared facilities.
You can be a public patient in a private room - many of the old style public hospitals (in the era under question) had a private room attached to each ward, for the very ill, or a troublesome patient, or a 'friend of the head honcho'.
There were some intermediate wards, but these days you can go intermediate in a public ward too.
It means you pay for your bed but not as much as a private patient does, and you can have your own doctor as long as he is recognised by the hospital, or you can have a hospital-appointed doctor.
In an emergency, public hospital is best - in a private hospital, by law (in Oz anyway) the staff can't give any assistance without direct orders from the patient's doctor. I once saw a patient nearly bleed to death because her private doctor could not be reached quickly
though this was in NSW not Qld.
Dawn M
