Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the findings of the Royal College of Radiologists Insight Panel survey, conducted in October 2022, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that the NHS (a) has sufficient staff to meet demand for and (b) is prepared for additional pressure on diagnostic services during winter 2022.

The National Health Service is developing initiatives to address retention, staff health and wellbeing, options to return to work following retirement and ensuring the current workforce has the appropriate skills and training. The Department is working with NHS England on rapid international recruitment and the utilisation of support workers across professions. We are also expanding the digital passport scheme, which allows professionals to work across trusts.

The ‘Delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care’ sets out how the National Health Service will recover and expand elective services over the next three years. We have allocated more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25, in addition to the £2 billion Elective Recovery Fund and £700 million Targeted Investment Fund made available in 2021/2022 to increase elective activity. This aims to deliver the equivalent of approximately nine million additional checks and procedures and 30% further elective activity by 2024/25 than pre-pandemic levels. A proportion will be invested in workforce capacity and training and we have committed to invest £5.9 billion for new beds, equipment and technology. This has supported the development of 91 community diagnostic centres (CDCs), with plans for 160 CDCs by 2025. CDCs have provided more than 2.25 million tests to date. In 2022/23, we have provided £15 million for additional imaging equipment for acute diagnostic imaging departments, which will deliver a further 37,000 tests during the winter in 30 NHS trusts and more than 160,000 tests in 2023/24. We are also upgrading 200 magnetic resonance imaging scanners to increase capacity.