The Yorkshire Clinic, the district's private hospital, looks set to be taken over by health care giant Bupa.

Bupa today announced it had agreed to buy its rival Community Health Group (CHG) - which owns the Yorkshire Clinic in Cottingley - for around £230 million, creating the UK's biggest private hospitals group.

Keith Hague, general manager at the Yorkshire Clinic, said the 72-bed hospital was the largest in the CHG group, and undertook complex operations such as heart surgery.

The hospital, which has been open for 18 years, runs two sister hospitals in Manchester and Doncaster. It treats about 8,000 in-patients a year, as well as seeing 40,000 in out-patient clinics.

And a deal for a new £2 million scanner suite at the Yorkshire Clinic - including CT and a hi-tech MRI scanner - has been completed this week and will still go ahead as planned.

The take-over will see Bupa add CHG's 21 hospitals to its existing estate of 37.

The two parties hope to have the deal tied up by mid-June subject to any investigations by the Office of Fair Trading.

Other private health care providers are also understood to have put in bids for the group.

Mr Hague said he believed staff would be unaffected by the take-over, but the hospital's 285 employees currently had share ownership which would be lost if Bupa owned the group. "I think that will be a big loss to the staff," he said.

Val Gooding, chief executive at Bupa, said: "CHG is a high quality, well-managed business that shares our customer service philosophy.

"There is an excellent fit between the two businesses that will give us access to new markets that we do not currently serve."

CHG, formerly the fourth largest company in the sector, saw its shares fall to 308p this year, but the stock leapt this week after Bupa announced it was considering a bid. The offer from Bupa represents 650p per share.

Alan Pilgrim, chief executive at CHG, said: "There is an overwhelming logic for consolidation in the sector."

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