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Community diagnostic centres ‘cutting NHS waits’ don’t exist yet [1]
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Date: 2023-08
Dozens of the government’s flagship community diagnostic centres said to be reducing record NHS waits are not even open yet, openDemocracy can reveal.
In fact, our investigation has found some of the health centres, known as CDCs, are years away from opening. We could only find evidence of 73 centres that are up and running – and some of those are in mobile units.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) this month claimed 114 centres were open across the country, saying they were helping cut NHS waiting lists by offering more tests for patients. Ministers have also touted the plans as proof that the private health sector can be used to boost capacity in the NHS.
But local NHS hospital trusts and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) responsible for 32 of the CDCs listed as open have said they will not be operational until later this year or even next year.
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And one CDC in Slough is not due to open until 2025, NHS Frimley Health Trust confirmed. Despite this, it still appears on the government’s list of operational centres.
Nearby Heatherwood Hospital, which only opened last year, is also counted on the list, but the trust said “there isn’t going to be an additional diagnostics centre there, but it does a lot of diagnostics”.
Long-time NHS campaigner John Lister told openDemocracy the findings “strip away the veneer of spin from DHSC and ministerial statements”.
“This explains why, according to government figures the 114 CDCs they claim have already come on stream are only delivering an average of just over 500 procedures each per week: many of them don't even exist!" he added.
"The grim reality is that the delays in diagnosis and treatment flow from 13 years of under-funding of the NHS, and are worsened now by the decision to squander public money on profit-seeking private units rather than expand and upgrade NHS units.”
The ICB covering Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire also confirmed to openDemocracy that there are no community diagnostics centres in the area, even though the government lists a centre open there.
Staff at the location of one CDC listed in Leeds said they had no knowledge of it, while in Blackpool, an existing health centre said plans to upgrade it had never got off the ground.
In Derbyshire, a local NHS trust said three centres, which the government list as open, are not yet operational. At Florence Nightingale Community Hospital in Derby a “new purpose-built CDC suite” is “expected to be completed by summer 2024”. A centre in Tamworth at the Sir Robert Peel Community Hospital is “expected to be completed by the end of the year”, while the CDC at Ilkeston Community Hospital is “expected to be fully operational by January 2024”.
In Coventry, the NHS announced in May that the existing City of Coventry Health Centre will be transformed into “a modern, state-of-the-art facility” opening in early 2025. In addition, the trust said it planned to open a new Endoscopy Unit at the Hospital of St Cross in Rugby later in the year. But the government has listed both of the centres as already open.
Two centres in Essex – one in Thurrock and a second in Braintree – were also announced by the NHS earlier this year, with the local trust saying they were “due to open in 2024”. They are both listed as already open by the government. Mid and South Essex NHS trust cautioned that “like many parts of the country, our challenge will be recruiting the additional staff needed for the [Thurrock] Centre so we are starting to look at staffing plans now”.
A centre in a former department store in Poole is open, but it appears to have been listed twice by the government.
A spokesperson for NHS Humber and North Yorkshire ICB confirmed two centres in York and Selby are not open until the end of the year, despite the government claiming otherwise.
And NHS Somerset told us it only has one centre in Taunton and that two centres listed by the government in West Mendip and Bridgewater were actually “health and wellbeing hubs”. While NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB confirmed that two centres in Barrow and Morecambe listed as open by the government had in fact "no confirmed date" for their opening.
openDemocracy also found announcements about new centres opening in Cambridgeshire, Ealing, Greater Manchester, Kent, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight in autumn and in 2024. Again, these are all listed by the government as already being open.
A further nine CDCs in Barking, Wisbech, Corby, South Warwickshire, Gateshead, Bolton, Andover and Somerset are still in construction but their trusts said they have opened temporary mobile units in the meantime.
openDemocracy could not establish whether three of the 114 centres are open because no information exists about them online and their trusts did not reply to our requests for comment.
And it is not clear whether six of the 114 centres even exist because both the DHSC and NHS England refused to provide openDemocracy with the full list. A list that was published by the government in June only lists 108 CDCs.
The latter said the list was for operational purposes only and that we should use Google to identify the centres that had not been revealed.
Last year, an openDemocracy investigation could only find evidence that 17 of the 69 centres the government said were running were actually open.
The development of CDCs was a key recommendation of a review of NHS diagnostics capacity published in 2020.
Mike Richards who carried out the review said the facilities should be “located away from acute hospitals, in easily accessible locations, including town and city centres”.
But several of the centres appear to be in existing hospitals, including one in West Berkshire which admitted the funding was used to replace its “ageing machines” rather than open a new community location.
In July, a damning report by the public spending watchdog found the government was not going to hit Boris Johnson’s promise of building 40 new hospitals by 2030.
Days later, Rishi Sunak doubled down on the claim, saying: “Not only are we going to deliver on our manifesto commitment to build 40 new hospitals across the country by 2030, we are not stopping there; we are also delivering 100 hospital upgrades across the country, and crucially more than 100 new community diagnostic centres to speed up treatment for people.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "A total of 114 centres across the country have helped to deliver over four million additional tests, checks and scans since July 2021 – and we’re expanding current capacity by delivering up to 160 centres by spring 2025.
“The majority of these sites are permanent, and alongside these we’ve opened a number of temporary sites while construction takes place to accelerate capacity and ensure patients receive the diagnosis they need quicker.”
Editor's note: Figures have been updated as confirmation has been received on whether CDCs are open or not.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/community-diagnostic-centres-nhs-waits-dhsc/
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