New diagnostic centres to boost NHS testing capacity in England

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The NHS in England will be given the capacity to perform almost 750,000 more tests and checks a year through a number of new “one-stop shop” community diagnostic centres, more than half of them funded by private-sector capital.

The government on Friday announced 13 new centres, to which patients will be referred by doctors for scans and other investigations, as it taps new sources of funding to tackle record waiting lists amid tight public-sector spending constraints.

Eight of the centres will be run by the private sector, as the Financial Times first reported on Wednesday, part of a plan backed by an elective recovery task force set up last year by prime minister Rishi Sunak.

Staff in the privately run CDCs will be employed by the independent sector, which will also own the buildings, keeping them off the Treasury balance sheet.

Five of them will be in the south-west and operated by InHealth, a specialist provider of diagnostic tests that has worked with the NHS for more than 30 years. They will be fully open in 2024. The other three — in Southend, Northampton and south Birmingham — will be operational by the end of this year.

Together with five more NHS-run centres across the country, backed by £2.3bn, the new centres will be able to deliver 742,000 more tests a year.

Sunak has made cutting waiting lists one of his five “people’s priorities” ahead of the general election expected next year. But he acknowledged on Wednesday that about 7.9mn people are awaiting non-urgent hospital treatment, the highest since records began.

More diagnostic equipment is badly needed in the NHS, which has fewer scanners and other facilities than many comparable OECD countries. At present, just four CDCs are being run fully by the independent sector.

David Hare, chief executive of the Independent Health Providers Network and a member of the task force, said the government’s announcement marked “a real, significant step forward to unlocking more of the capital, capacity and capability of the independent sector”.

Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said hospital trusts would welcome the extra support but insisted that the NHS be given the capital funding it needed “now and in the longer term to expand its own diagnostics capacity amid a backdrop of growing patient demand”.

Health secretary Steve Barclay said it was important to “use every available resource to deliver life-saving checks to ease pressure on the NHS”. The task force had identified “additional diagnostic capacity that is available in the independent sector, which we will now use more widely to enable patients to access the care they need quicker,” he added.

Separately, the health department on Friday highlighted a new procurement system, the Provider Selection Regime. Its aim is to give bodies buying healthcare for the NHS more flexibility when selecting providers, in a push to cut unnecessary competitive tendering.

However, Labour sought to underline the government’s failure to make greater use of the private sector, saying that its spare capacity could have enabled treatment for a further 331,000 NHS patients since January 2022.