Where can you go to get your scan?

What are Community Diagnostic Centres and where are they?

Where can you go to get your scan?

Literally, where can you go to get your scan? There was no list until we published ours.

What are “Community Diagnostic Centres”?

This Government and the last have poured money into “Community Diagnostic Centres” (also called hubs) which are places you can be referred to get the most commonly needed scan / tests done, without going through the hospital waiting list. The CDC programme is probably the right thing to do for the long term future of the NHS, but how do you get there?

Government guidance says your GP can refer you to a CDC for a test instead of referring you to a hospital, but they have to know where these new centres are (which they don’t), and you have to know whether it’s convenient for you (which you probably don’t either).

But, if you and your GP are on the boundary between one London Borough and another, your GP will not get told of a CDC a street away on the wrong side of the boundary. If you live in Ilford you may want to go to Mile End (on the tube) because it’s more convenient even if it’s not the closest. Your GP wouldn’t have been told it existed. For Cambridge, your “local” CDC is on the far side of Ely and a long walk from the train station; the easiest (and possibly quickest) one to get to by train is in Bishops Stortford round the corner from the station (technically it’s around two corners) – but that’s a different ICB so your South Cambs GP wouldn’t necessarily know about it (they probably do now). If you’re driving, you may want one convenient for somewhere else you go, because NHS boundaries are administrative fictions irrelevant to patients.

If Mr Streeting wants patients to be able to go to his new sites to get their scans, maybe the Department of Health in England could maintain a list on the NHS website with actual postcodes and what services are available. And from there, other people can take the list and show what user centered design looks like, rather than DH/E centered design which has produced nothing at all.

We hear some areas block GPs from making referrals entirely despite government guidance otherwise.

But what about all those press stories about a new centre?

Whenever a new CDCs opens there are lots of press releases about the new centre (some of which sometimes include an address!) – the Department of Health in England is very proud of itself – but that’s only the new ones opening that week. Next week is a different press release on a different page.

Going through NHS England’s CDC Management Information, some of these new centres are very odd: Something calling itself a CDC in Liverpool “can’t see NHS patients”, one in Exeter has no parking and is 20 minutes walk from the train station, neither the “Camborne and Redruth CDC”  and “North Cumbria CDC” have been built yet but both seems to be doing a surprising list of procedures (from a carpark elsewhere?), “Taunton Central CDC” and ”Somerset West CDC”  are on the same site with different names doing different procedures, and there seems to be no evidence anywhere of Guest CDC (ODS code: G5U3D) anywhere online other than the press releases talking about it, while “Hereford City” is an MRI scanner in a car park, and the “Stoke On Trent CDC” is in Carlisle (150+ miles away – something’s wrong there), while the addresses for Skegness and Grantham CDCs are the same (they’re reporting different numbers of procedures so something odd there) and there seems to be no physical presence of “Scarborough Gateway CDC” at all.

 

Is there any list of CDCs?

A Parliamentary question was asked on the topic, and the reply says this:

“A list of community diagnostic centres (CDCs) is published by NHS England, and is available on the NHS.UK website, in an online only format. Where a newly opened CDC starts to deliver activity, this will be captured in an updated publication. This includes temporary CDC sites that are delivering services on an interim basis whilst the permanent CDC site is under construction.”

So apparently there is a list. This is what it looks like:

“The list” is the spreadsheet behind the published figure of which centres did what funded activity that month. It says nothing about where they are (especially because the hospital CDCs are not supposed to be using the same door as the hospital – the hospital runs it, but the “spoke site” is required to be physically separate, which might just be next door). You can’t even google the name to find the address, and sometimes the place talked about in press releases isn’t quite the same as the site of the CDC.

If a GP wanted to tell a patient to look at that list, the list is useless to anyone other than NHS accountants. And a GP will only know about the convenient ones, your GP can’t know that one further away is actually more convenient for you on the way to work.

There was no list. So we made one; it’s here.

We published it openly so google, chatGPT, and others can all learn where these things are, and they will have better information about where you can get your scan than Wes Streeting’s preferred chatbots which is obliged to follow Wes’s Official Truth..