BBC Radio Solent says the Royal Haslar hospital in Portsmouth is to close.

The move is part of a shake-up of the medical defence service to be announced in the House of Commons on Monday.

It is expected to say that the 245-year-old hospital will be replaced by a military wing in a new NHS hospital, although other options are under consideration.

Also expected is an announcement that the government plans to set up a new centre for defence medicine.

The government's strategic defence review said that the medical defence service urgently needed more staff.

It stated that a shortage of trained staff meant that the service was not capable of properly serving British forces abroad.

Among its recommendations were calls for urgent efforts to recruit more staff, an extra 800 field hospital beds, a casualty receiving ship with 200 beds and improvements to the military ambulance and medical supply service.

Europe's biggest brick building

The Royal Haslar hospital was opened in 1753 to serve the Royal Navy.

It cost £38,000 to build and was originally designed to house 1,500 patients on 48 wards.

For a time it was the biggest brick building in Europe.

The military faces staffing shortages in its medical service

In 1963, the hospital began admitting patients from the local population who now provide the majority of its caseload. It has 375 beds and in 1997/98 treated 21,000 people in accident and emergency, the vast majority being civilians.

About 30% of inpatients and outpatients are military personnel.

The hospital also serves as a worldwide referral centre for the armed service and a training base for doctors and nurses deployed in military units and abroad, including the Falklands.

The Royal Haslar has long-standing ties with Southampton University and has recently developed links with the Postgraduate Medical School of Portsmouth University.

Closure of military hospitals

By 1996, it had doctors and nurses from the RAF, army and navy.

This change happened as a result of other military hospitals being closed down.

The hospital is run by a mixture of civilian and uniformed medical staff. Some 700 are military while 560 are civilian.

The Royal Haslar has all the latest technology, including recompression chambers which can treat divers with the bends.

The hospital also has an award-winning tele-medicine unit which links medics in war zones with specialists at the hospital.

A high-speed digital camera takes photographs of x-rays in war zones which can then be sent to the Royal Haslar using e-mail.

Doctors can then read the x-rays and give advice to doctors in the field.

There are two possibilities being mooted for Haslar: