A MULTI-MILLION-pound eye hospital, which claims to be the best in the world and the largest of its kind in Britain, opens in Hampshire today.

Solent Eye Hospital will welcome its first patient to its state-of the art treatment rooms on the Solent Business Park in Whiteley.

The private hospital has taken premises in the Fusion 3 buildings formerly occupied by Lloyds TSB which have undergone a custom £10m fit-out with £2.2m surgical and diagnostic equipment and two operating theatres.

Some 19 consultant ophthalmic surgeons from nearby Southampton and Portsmouth hospitals will practise in the 14,000 square feet facility offering various treatments for vision correction, cataracts, glaucoma, retinal disease and age-related macular degeneration. The hospital has created 21 jobs.

Chief executive Tim Clover said the speed of technological development had outpaced the ability of many general hospitals to keep up and the hospital would be the largest eye specialist centre in the country and the only one in the region.

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“If you want to have a full range of diagnostic capacities you have to put them in a specialist centre.

“It’s pretty fair to say this place is the best eye hospital in the world,” he said.

Mr Clover said he hoped to be treating up to 3,000 patients a year and had established a research programme with Southampton University.

It is the fourth private hospital to be opened by eye surgery provider Optegra, backed by healthcare investment firm Moonray, which Mr Clover also heads.

Optegra opened its first hospital in Guildford in 2008 and acquired two others in Yorkshire and Birmingham earlier this year following a £37m cash injection from Moonray.

A fifth hospital will open in Manchester by the end of the year.