Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what eligibility criteria his Department plan to use to determine (a) where new Community Diagnostic Centres are located and (b) the order in which they are rolled out.

To identify appropriate locations, integrated care systems (ICSs) are required to ensure that proposed sites meet the specifications of being separate from acute diagnostics and are able to accommodate minimum community diagnostic centre (CDC) services.

All proposed CDCs go through an approvals process led by systems and NHS England, prior to approval by Ministers.

NHS England’s ambition is that each ICS will have at least one standard or large model CDC.

The first CDCs to open were early adopter sites that could be stood up quickly with no capital investment requirements, to add much-needed additional diagnostic capacity to address the diagnostic backlog. Where required, these temporary sites are being replaced. There are no other eligibility criteria on the order in which CDCs are being rolled out.