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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
People with cancer face ‘ticking timebomb' due to NHS staff shortages
People with cancer face a 'ticking timebomb' of delays in getting diagnosed and treated because the NHS is too short-staffed to provide prompt care, senior doctors have warned. An NHS-wide shortage of radiologists and oncologists means patients are enduring long waits to have surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy and have a consultant review their care. Hold-ups lead to some people's cancer spreading, which can reduce the chances of their treatment working and increase the risk of death, the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) said. NHS cancer services are struggling to keep up with rising demand for tests, such as scans and X-rays, and treatment, created by the growing number of people getting the disease. Evidence the RCR collected from the heads of NHS cancer centres across the UK and the clinical directors of radiology departments shows that delays to potentially 'life-saving' care occur because of 'chronic' workforce gaps. All radiology bosses surveyed said during 2024 their units could not scan all patients within the NHS's maximum waiting times because they did not have enough staff. 'Delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment will inevitably mean that for some patients their cancer will progress while they wait, making successful treatment more difficult and risking their survival,' said Dr Katharine Halliday, the RCR's president. The findings are particularly worrying because research has found that a patient's risk of death can increase by about 10% for each month they have to wait for treatment. Nine out of 10 cancer centre chiefs said patients were delayed starting their treatment last year while seven in 10 said they feared workforce gaps were putting patients' safety at risk. 'The government must train up more radiologists and oncologists to defuse this ticking timebomb for cancer diagnosis and treatment,' added Halliday. One head of a cancer service said patients with suspected bladder or prostate cancer had faced long waits to be tested, that more than 1,500 patients had to wait longer than they should for a follow-up appointment to review their treatment, and that staff were feeling 'burnt out'. Other doctors also said: 'Our waiting times for breast radiotherapy are now the worst I have ever known in 20 years.' 'Current wait for head and neck cancers [is] six weeks, meaning possible progression before radiotherapy.' 'A multiple week wait for palliative treatment has sometimes led to deterioration to the point is no longer possible.' Some cancer centres are so short-staffed that they are sending patients to be treated quicker at nearby hospitals under 'mutual aid' agreements, the RCR says in two reports published on Thursday. Radiologists and clinical oncologists face 'unsustainable' workloads, it adds. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion The strain of working in overstretched cancer services is so great that doctors are quitting at younger ages, with some even doing so while still in their 30s, the RCR found. Genevieve Edwards, the chief executive of Bowel Cancer UK, said: 'The disease is treatable and curable if diagnosed early, but too many patients are facing long delays to start their treatment after going to their GP with symptoms. These delays may lead to the cancer spreading, making it harder to treat successfully.' The Department of Health and Social Care acknowledged that too many patients face delays. 'This government inherited a broken NHS where too many cancer patients are waiting too long for treatment but through our plan for change, we are determined to tackle delays, diagnose cancer earlier and treat it faster,' a spokesperson said. 'We are delivering 40,000 more appointments every week, investing £1.5bn in both new surgical hubs and AI scanners, rolling out cutting-edge radiotherapy machines to every region in the country, and backing our radiologists and oncologists with above inflation pay rises for the second year in a row. 'Later this year we will also publish a refreshed workforce plan to ensure the NHS has the right people in the right places to deliver the care patients need.'
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
NHS gave private firms record £216m to examine X-rays in 2024
The NHS handed private firms a record £216m last year to examine X-rays and scans because hospitals have too few radiologists. The amount of money NHS organisations across the UK are paying companies to interpret scans has doubled in five years amid a spike in demand for diagnostic tests. Despite the rise in privatisation, the NHS in England still failed to read 976,000 X-rays and CT and MRI scan results within its one month target – the most ever. Scans play a crucial role in telling doctors if a patient has cancer or a broken bone, for example. The Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), which collated the figures from doctors across the UK, said the £216m given to private firms in 2024 was 'a false economy' which it blamed on the NHS's failure to recruit enough specialists to read all the scans patients have in its hospitals. The college fears that the growing outsourcing of scan analysis risks creating 'a vicious cycle' in which NHS radiology services are increasingly weakened and its doctors drawn to private work. Dr Katharine Halliday, the RCR's president, said: 'The current sticking plaster approach to managing excess demand in radiology is unsustainable and certainly isn't working for patients, who face agonising waits for answers about their health. 'It is a false economy to be spending over £200m of NHS funds outsourcing radiology work to private companies and evidence of our failure to train and retain the amount of NHS radiologists we need.' RCR figures show the NHS across the four home nations had 4,923 consultant radiologists in 2023, which was 1,962 fewer than the 6,467 it believes are needed – a 30% shortfall. The college's latest annual census of radiology services found that the amount NHS trusts and health boards have handed to private firms across the UK rose dramatically from £108m in 2019 to £174m in 2023 and then by another 24% year on year to last year's £216m. David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest thinktank, which tracks NHS privatisation, said the NHS's increasing outsourcing of the reporting of scans is helping to fuel a boom in private diagnostic services, the total value of which experts say is now £10.7bn. He said: 'The increasing reliance of the NHS on private diagnostic services has only occurred because the NHS has been defunded over the last decade and there hasn't been sufficient investment in capital infrastructure such as new scanners. 'Relying on private finance to fill that gap is both more costly and risks hollowing out NHS [radiology] departments, as has happened in many other areas of outsourced care.' As a consequence the health service had fewer opportunities to train new radiologists, which endangered the long-term viability of its own radiology services, he added. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion The RCR's figures were supplied by clinical directors of NHS radiology services. They also show that almost every NHS radiology department now outsources at least some of its workload to private firms, which are based in the UK and abroad. The Department of Health and Social Care said paying private firms to interpret scan results was a good use of NHS funding and a vital way of ensuring that happens promptly. A DHSC spokesperson said: 'Given the scale of NHS waiting lists, it would be a dereliction of duty not to use every available resource to get patients the care they need. 'The independent sector will play a vital role in busting the backlog. This has contributed to our significant progress, with the 2m extra NHS appointments we promised being delivered seven months early.' The updated version of the NHS's long-term workforce plan for England, due this summer, would give the health service the personnel it needed to cope with demand, they added.
