Plans for £65M expansion to West Midlands hospital given the go-ahead.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham has been given the green light to begin a multi-million pound expansion project, which will see its postgraduate centre knocked down and replaced by a new, partly private, seven-storey building.

The hospital said the new base ‘will deliver high quality acute healthcare for private patients in the region, as well as providing additional capacity and specialist facilities for NHS patients’.

The scheme is a joint venture between the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and HCA Healthcare UK.

It will provide 138 beds including 72 for the NHS and 66 for private patients, while it will employ 150 people including 97 nurses.

The 14,728m² hospital will be equipped with the latest technology to provide some of the most complex surgical and medical procedures in cancer, cardiology, neurology, hepatobiliary, urology, orthopaedics and stem cell transplantation.

The scheme, which has been designed by HOK, will be built by VINCI Construction UK. Construction is expected to be finished by 2020.