IT'S A TALE of two hospitals...York-based Shepherd Construction is now in the final stages of creating a new private, £22 million high-tech hospital in Oxford.

At the same time, it is well advanced in its building of a £20.5 million hospital project on the site of the former Nestl Rowntree canteen in Haxby Road, York. Both projects are for Nuffield Hospitals.

The building in Oxford is being "fitted out" ready for completion in early summer, while the York Nuffield Hospital should be rea-dy by winter.

The new three-storey building in Oxford covers an area of about 15,000 square metres and will provide technologically advanced medical facilities as well as much needed extra space for the existing Acland Hospital, which is moving to the new premises on Monday, October 25.

The building incorporates six operating theatres, 25 consulting rooms, 86 beds (including six Intensive Therapy Unit beds) together with underground basement car parking for 120 cars. The facility also houses an impressive atrium with an "inflatable" roof, where daylight enters the building through transparent air-filled pillows which are one third of the weight of glass.

At the York site, a new bedroom block and rooftop plant room is being built as an extension to the existing Edwardian three-storey building, with the transformation scheduled for completion by December.

By the time the Nuffield Hospital moves out of its leased premises at the Purey Cust site in York city centre, and into a new hospital almost twice the size, it will mean employment for another 50 people, bringing the total to 210.

Sally Brown, matron and project director, is overseeing the complete re-configuration and refurbishment of the 1912 building into a modern hospital.

It will feature 40 bedrooms, three operating theatres, imaging and physiotherapy departments and a health screening unit.

Updated: 10:00 Thursday, May 06, 2004