The firm picked to build the new super hospital at Southmead is due to be announced on Tuesday.

At the same time North Bristol NHS Trust will also make public the designs for the new hospital for the first time.

The chosen contractor will work with the trust on the detailed designs for the super hospital which is expected to be ready to take its first patients in four years' time.

Ever since Southmead was chosen as the site for the new £374 million hospital, people in South Gloucestershire have fought against the plans, which will also mean Frenchay being downgraded to a community hospital and a new independent sector treatment centre being built in Emersons Green.

More than 50,000 people signed a petition opposing the plans and a legal challenge was mounted by members of the Save Frenchay Hospital Group to the building of the private treatment centre.

They lost their appeal at the High Court and the centre, the first of its kind in Bristol, was approved last year.

UK Specialist Hospitals, which runs the Shepton Mallet ISTC, will run the centre at Brook Business Park, off the A4174 Avon Ring Road.

The centre, which will have four operating theatres and 34 beds, for ear nose and throat, general surgery, gynaecology and orthopaedic surgery, is due to open later this year.

Northavon MP Steve Webb, who has long campaigned for Frenchay to be the new super hospital site, said choosing Southmead would prove to be a costly mistake.

He said: "Our local hospitals certainly need modernising, but choosing Southmead for the new super hospital site risks being a multi-million pound mistake.

"If we are to have just two hospitals to serve the whole of Bristol and South Gloucestershire, and one is in the centre of Bristol, it makes no sense for the other to be just a few miles up the road also in Bristol.

"The decision to shut Frenchay always seemed like a bad one, but with government plans for more than 30,000 new homes in South Gloucestershire, that decision now looks a whole lot worse.

"Thousands of the new homes are to be built to the east of Bristol, almost on the doorstep of Frenchay, while thousands more are planned for areas such as Yate where people will have to drive past Frenchay to get to Southmead. In an emergency, those vital minutes could make the difference between life and death.

"I am also concerned that the Government is pressing ahead with using the discredited PFI method to finance the new hospital.

"Private contractors have made a fortune while the taxpayer has had very poor value for money on many of these schemes. Given that the Government can borrow money much more cheaply that the private sector - who are having trouble borrowing money at all - why should we pay over-the-odds for a privately funded project?

"This is money that should have been spent on healthcare, not on inflated borrowing costs."

Under the PFI scheme the chosen contractor will pay for the building of the hospital and will be responsible for the running of the buildings and services like boiler maintenance, for 30 years.

The deal will cost the Trust about £36m a year in monthly payments, for 30 years.