The NHS does not have the 6,000 staff needed to run its promised array of new testing centres designed to speed up diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, medical leaders are warning.
The drive to recruit the radiographers and radiologists needed to take and analyse scans and X-rays at the community diagnostic centres (CDCs) in England risks already-understaffed hospitals losing key staff to work there, a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” strategy that would backfire, they claim.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has confirmed in a written parliamentary answer that the centres will need an extra 3,500 radiographers to carry out diagnostics tests and 2,000 radiologists to interpret the results, as well as 500 advanced practitioners, who are radiographers with additional training to report on images.
NHS England has promised to spend £2.3bn setting up at least 100 CDCs by early 2025, and ultimately more than 160 of them, as part of a major effort to identify life-threatening diseases such as cancer and diabetes sooner and tackle the NHS’s huge backlog of non-urgent hospital care. They are central to its “elective recovery plan” to address the 6.1m-strong treatment backlog.
It has pledged that the centres “will significantly increase the diagnostic capacity available for suspected cancer and support faster diagnosis and reduced waiting times”. It plans to site many of the new centres on high streets and has promoted them as user-friendly places where “combining a diagnostic test with a shopping trip will be far more common in the future”. The centres will help deliver it 9m more tests and checks a year by 2025, it said.
But groups representing the staff needed insist that the extra 6,000 specialists do not exist.
“There is a real concern that CDCs will be staffed with radiographers and other staff that are only available because they have left jobs elsewhere in the NHS,” said Richard Evans, the chief executive of the Society and College of Radiographers.
“Robbing Peter to pay Paul is never a good strategy and it could be disastrous for NHS diagnostics as a whole.”
While “delivering diagnostics quickly and more conveniently for the public is an admirable plan”, the UK will need to train more homegrown radiographers and also recruit more from overseas if the NHS is to fulfil its ambition, Evans added.
The Royal College of Radiologists warned that patients who are due to have a diagnostic test at a hospital where staff have left to work in the CDCs could face a longer wait for it, a delay to the start of their treatment and potentially a poorer outcome as a result.
“Over 80% of patients treated in a hospital have images such as an X-ray, CT or MRI interpreted by a radiologist, often at the beginning of their diagnosis and treatment.
“Any delay in taking or interpreting these images risks creating a choke point for other areas of the NHS, impacting our ability to deliver effective treatment for most illnesses,” said Dr Jeanette Dickson, the college’s president. The NHS is already short of 1,939 consultant radiologists, she added.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said patients were paying the price for the government’s failure to address longstanding NHS staff shortages.
“The super massive black hole in the government’s NHS recovery plan was the lack of a workforce strategy. NHS staff have gone above and beyond in the past two years, but there aren’t enough of them. Patients will continue waiting longer for care until the staff shortages are fixed.
“After a decade of Tory mismanagement, the NHS went into the pandemic with 100,000 vacancies. It’s not just that the Conservatives didn’t fix the roof when the sun was shining, they dismantled the roof and removed the floorboard,” he said.
A spokesperson for the DHSC said: “Our record investment in the NHS includes an extra £2bn this year and £8bn over the next three years to tackle the backlog caused by the pandemic.
“There are record numbers of staff working in the NHS in England and we are focused on securing even more staff, as well as making patient care as effective and efficient as possible, so we can continue to ensure the NHS is always there for those who need it.”
