Since the end of the pandemic, it has been a constant and ever-present challenge for the government to reduce waiting lists and help people get the care they need. Last year, in order to address this challenge, the government created the new ‘Elective Recovery Taskforce’. This was formed to help identify ways to cut waiting times and publish plans to maximise independent sector capacity to treat NHS patients more quickly.
Last week, the Health Secretary announced that a new Community Diagnostic Centre is set to open in Redruth which will support the wider Camborne and Redruth area and help local residents get the best care possible close to where they live. It will help increase earlier diagnosis, ensuring that patients more quickly get the care they need and will also, where possible, prioritise pre and post-operative testing for patients treated in the expanding number of surgical hubs, to further increase the number of elective procedures and cut waiting lists.
The new diagnostic centre at Redruth will increase diagnostic capacity and reduce waiting times, with state-of-the-art equipment to deliver CT, MRI, ultrasound, X-ray, echocardiography, cardiology, respiratory, pathology and endoscopy tests and scans. Once fully operational, it will have the capacity to deliver up to 74,284 checks, tests and scans a year. This centre will be open in 2024. While it is being constructed, additional diagnostic testing capacity will be provided through mobile facilities from September 2023 at Camborne and Redruth Community Hospital.
This announcement is part of the wider plan the government has to invest £2.3 billion in creating new up to 160 diagnostic centres across the country to help tackle the COVID-19 backlog. In Cornwall, pressures on the NHS are always more pronounced because we are a peninsula at the end of the line. It is harder to encourage nursing staff and doctors to move to Cornwall and stay here, it is harder to draw on resources from neighbouring areas to spread the load because we are surrounded by coastline, we have a larger elderly population, and the social care system is also struggling to provide enough capacity and recruit enough staff. If hospitals can't discharge patients to a suitable care home, then they can't find beds for those needing admission and if ambulances cannot unload patients at the front door, they cannot get back out on the road to attend to new problems.
There is no single solution to help the system work better under the sharp increase in demand we have seen but enabling the NHS to catch illness and disease earlier is key to reducing the backlog. When it opens, the new diagnostic centre will be another important step forward for health services in our area.
