‘One-stop shops’ on high streets for cancer, heart AND blood tests
CANCER checks, heart scans and blood tests are set to be carried out in hundreds of NHS ‘one stop shops’ on high streets across the country.
The diagnostic hubs will allow patients to have vital checks close to their home – while ensuring hospitals are left clear for serious care.
Empty shops in town centres and retail parks will be targeted for the scheme which will see 160 centres set up to deliver MRI and CT scans, X-rays, ultrasounds and blood tests.
This will allow doctors to quickly diagnose conditions such as cancer, heart disease, strokes and breathing problems. In time they could be also used for breast cancer screening, antenatal ultrasound scans, ear tests and eye tests.
Health bosses last night stressed the centres would be ‘Covid-free’, hopefully giving patients confidence they will be safe from the virus.
Officials are increasingly concerned that thousands of patients died during the first lockdown because they were afraid of going to hospital.
The toll is expected to grow in the coming years because cases of cancer, heart disease or diabetes that were not diagnosed will escalate until they are impossible to treat.
Figures published by Breast Cancer Now this week revealed nearly one million women had missed out on mammograms because screening programmes had been paused.
Professor Sir Mike Richards was commissioned by NHS boss Sir Simon Stevens to review diagnostic services. His report, presented to the NHS at a board meeting yesterday, said establishing these centres would be quicker and safer for patients.
Sir Mike, who was the first NHS national cancer director and the Care Quality Commission’s chief inspector of hospitals, said: ‘The pandemic has brought into sharper focus the need to overhaul the way our diagnostic services are delivered. Not only will these changes make services more accessible and convenient for patients but they will help improve outcomes for patients with cancer and other serious conditions.’
His report also called for a major boost in staffing, with ,000 radiologists and 4,000 radiographers needed, as well as other support staff.
Officials said the proposals would be implemented with some to be introduced with immediate effect and incorporated into the NHS post-pandemic ‘recovery plans’. Several testing hubs are set to be introduced in the coming weeks.
Miriam Deakin, director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, which
‘Help in tackling backlogs of care’
represents NHS trusts, said: ‘Doing these checks in the community rather than in hospital could support trusts as they grapple with a second wave of Covid-19, winter pressures and tackling backlogs of care.’
The wider plan will be implemented over the next five years.
More than seven in ten voters in ‘Red Wall’ seats that swung to the Tories have seen boarded up shops or local job losses due to the pandemic.
A survey has laid bare worries about the collapse of the retail sector in the constituencies across the North, Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber that switched from Labour to the Conservatives at the last election.
It was commissioned by Best for Britain, which is calling on Boris Johnson to strike a Brexit trade deal to avoid further economic damage.
PROMISING to breathe fresh life into forgotten towns and cities reaped huge electoral rewards for Mr Johnson.
So the alarm new ‘Blue Wall’ voters feel at their communities being gouged out by mounting High Street shop closures and job losses should concern No10.
And the humiliation of Rolls-Royce, a jewel in Britain’s industrial crown, begging for survival funds should also give ministers nightmares. The failure to get planes flying again has devastated the engine maker, on whom countless smaller firms rely.
Without hiking taxes – which would cull growth and aspiration – the Chancellor must turbocharge these Covid-blighted sectors. Neglecting them would be bad for Britain and for the Tories.