Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health has extended the deadline for contractors to submit prices to build the estimated $1.2bn King Khaled Medical City project in Dammam.

The ministry has set a new deadline date of 18 August. Bids were originally due on 18 June.

The King Khaled Medical City will cover a total area of 700,000 square metres and will include a 1,500-bed hospital, residential complex, research centre and an international academy. The client for the project is the local King Fahad Specialist Hospital group. The US-based team Aecom/Ellerbe Becket is the architect and lead designer for the medical scheme.

The US’ Vanir Construction Management was awarded the contract to provide project management services for the medical project in January 2012.

The scheme is the latest of several medical city projects that have been tendered in the kingdom in recent months.

In December, contractors submitted bids for the contract to build the King Abdullah Medical City project. Located 28 kilometres from Mecca and 56km from Jeddah, the development will include hospital buildings, research centres, administration buildings and a housing community, with a total built-up area of nearly 1 million square metres.

The local Al-Rashid Trading & Contracting Company submitted the lowest bid of SR6.5bn ($1.7bn), which was 3.1 per cent lower than the SR6.7bn price submitted by Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), the second-lowest bidder. A consortium of the local Al-Bawani Company and Spain’s FCC Construccion submitted the third-lowest price of SR6.9bn.