The government has bought a private heart hospital in central London and returned it to the National Health Service, at a cost of �27m.

The hospital will become part of the University College of London Hospital (UCLH) and will enable staff there to double the number of heart operations currently carried out.

It will also free up capacity for other types of surgery, although the hospital's 600 private patients will continue on the same basis and staff will be paid at their old private rates for the duration of their contracts.

UCLH has welcomed the deal but Unison leaders are worried public money will be used to subsidise the private sector.

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Robert Naylor, chief executive of the University College of London Hospital Trust:

We think we have got an absolute deal for NHS patients here.

If we were to rebuild this hospital from scratch in the current location it would probably cost us getting on for twice as much as we paid for it, so this is a fantastic deal for the hospital, for the staff and most importantly for the patients.

Not only are we inheriting a fantastic facility for NHS patients but we are inheriting 162 staff to go along with that. And with staff shortages, particularly nurses in London, this is a great benefit and great boost for us.

At the moment we treating 600 private patients in the heart hospital and that will continue for the foreseeable future.

But the critical point here is that extra space that we will inherit will literally double the number of NHS patients that we will able to treat, thereby reducing waiting lists and reducing the time patients have to wait for these critical operations.

This money (to buy the hospital) has come from the capital side, which has enabled us to buy a facility which will belong to the health service and will allow us to literally double the number of NHS patients that we treat.

Not only that it will also create space in the Middlesex Hospital in Central London where we intend to treat a larger number of orthopaedic and urology patients to drive those waiting lists down as well.

The NHS patients will be treated through NHS income and the fact that we will be able to double the number of patients that come in there will be no subsidy at all.

This is a fantastic hospital and if it had not been rescued as it has in the last few days then there was every possibility that this hospital would have been turned into flats.

Now that would have been a terrible loss for the people of London and for our cardiac services. This really is a tremendous opportunity for us and I think I need to keep re-emphasising that.

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Geoff Martin, Unison:

If this was the straightforward renationalisation of a failing private hospital that it is being portrayed as then we would be very pleased about this.

But I think the real danger here is that what we are talking about is that the private patient complement of that hospital of about 600 patients a year will be ring-fenced and protected, with the infrastructure bailed out by taxpayers' money.

I would like to see how the equation stacks up because all we have heard is if this �27.5m was paid into the NHS we would not get the same number of beds.

Well how many of those beds are going to be ring-fenced for private patients and how much of that money is going to subsidise the consultants who have opted out of the NHS and will only want to do private work?

It is not as straightforward as it is being pictured.

If the NHS had not put �27.5m into this rescue operation for the heart hospital, the hospital would have gone bust.

Let's not run away with the idea that this is denationalisation as envisaged by the Atlee and Bevan government post-war.

This is actually a bail out of a failing private hospital and what it does do is nail the government's line that the private sector has got all the answers to running these kind of services.

Clearly they have not otherwise this hospital would not have been on the edge of going bankrupt.