Thirteen more community diagnostic centres (CDCs) have been announced across England to deliver more than 742,000 additional scans, tests and checks a year. Of the 13, eight will be run by the private sector, all providing treatment that is free at the point of need to the patient. Five of these will be in the South West, with permanent sites opening fully in 2024 in Redruth, Bristol, Torbay, Yeovil and Weston-super-Mare. Additional diagnostic testing capacity is already being rolled out in the region via the use of mobile diagnostic facilities, to provide additional diagnostic services while these sites are constructed.
Three others will open in Southend, Northampton and South Birmingham - with the former commencing activity from November and the latter two from December. There are already four operational CDCs run by the independent sector in Brighton, North Solihull, Oxford and Salford.
Five more NHS-run centres will also open in Hornchurch, Skegness, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent.
Health and Social Care Secretary, Steve Barclay, says: “We must use every available resource to deliver life-saving checks to ease pressure on the NHS.”
CDCs are helping to offer patients a wider choice of venues to receive treatment and checks. Utilising the available diagnostic capacity in the independent sector will further speed-up access to care.
The government has also set out a range of new measures to unlock spare capacity within the independent healthcare sector. This follows actions from the Elective Recovery Taskforce, which was established last December to look for ways to go further to bust the COVID-19 backlogs and reduce waiting times for patients.
The measures include a commitment to using data on independent sector providers to identify where they have capacity to take on more NHS patients to help clear the backlog, and increasing the use of the independent sector in training junior NHS staff.
Independent sector led centres will function like NHS-run CDCs, but staff will be employed by the independent sector, which also owns the buildings. The South West network will be run by InHealth, a specialist provider of diagnostic tests which has worked with hospitals and commissioners across the health service for more than 30 years. By utilising independent sector staff, the NHS will be able to keep pace with rising demand in the region and deliver a high number of tests for patients.
There are currently 114 CDCs open across the country, which have delivered an additional 4.6 million tests, checks and scans since July 2021. Alongside this, significant progress has already been made to cut waiting lists.
The department has also published its response to a consultation on a new procurement system known as the Provider Selection Regime, which will give commissioners of healthcare services more flexibility when selecting NHS and independent sector healthcare providers. This is intended to remove unnecessary levels of competitive tendering and barriers to integrating care, which will help to promote collaboration across the NHS and wider healthcare system.
