NHS pays private firms record £216m to examine X-rays

The NHS handed private firms a record £216m last year to examine X-rays and scans because hospitals have too few radiologists.

- Denis Campbell

The amount of money NHS organisations across the UK are paying companies to interpret scans has doubled in the space of five years, amid a spike in demand for diagnostic tests.

Despite that increasing privatisation, though, 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" that it blames on the NHS's failure to recruit enough specialists to "read" all the scans patients have in its hospitals.

The college fears that 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.