Six of the projects explicitly told openDemocracy their CDCs would not be open by the end of this month. The Wood Green, Telford, Bodmin and Oldham projects told us they were “on track” or “due” to open in summer 2022, with the Oldham project adding that plans were “at an early stage” and that they “haven’t had the groundbreaking ceremony yet”. Bolton and Humber both told us they couldn’t say yet when their centres would open, with the latter saying: “Apologies, there is no community diagnostic hub as yet. This is a five-year plan.”
Several more projects were unable to confirm any current new offer to patients, but told openDemocracy that something would be happening in future. The New QEII hospital in Welwyn Garden City told us it “expected” to have slightly longer hours in operation by the end of March, and Derbyshire said work “to get the funding utilised” for unspecified “additional services” before the end of March was “ongoing”.
Some were extremely vague on details, with Leicester saying only: “I’m told the service will be on our site,” and Sussex Health saying the developments would be “phased over the next three years”.
Twenty-three of the projects – more than half the 42 identified last year by the DHSC – were unable, or unwilling, to provide openDemocracy with any evidence that they had a community diagnostic centre either open or planned. Some expressed initial enthusiasm to talk to us, only to backtrack: Corbett Hospital, for example, initially said “we’d love to help, we are very proud of our CDC” but subsequently told us that we would have to submit a Freedom of Information request to get any answers about what new services, if any, were currently on offer. A number of Javid’s other centres are similarly understood to refer to new or extended services being opened within existing hospitals, though – again – no evidence could be found that these were up and running.
Many of the project areas appear to have put out very little public information as to the progress of their CDCs, or only the vaguest of briefings. Bath, for example, did not respond to openDemocracy’s enquiries, but subsequently issued a press release saying it had “progressed plans” for its centre at the formerly private-run Sulis Hospital.
NHS cash for the private sector
More than half the project areas we contacted refused to answer any questions about private sector provision but, of the 19 that did, the majority confirmed that some of what was being offered had been outsourced to the private sector, including MRI and CT scans, endoscopies and blood tests.
In at least one case, the answer given contradicted publicly available information. At Brighton Football Ground, a high-profile CDC repeatedly referred to by Javid, local NHS commissioners told us the services were “NHS services and NHS provision” – but, according to the Care Quality Commission, the site is run by Medical Imaging Partnership, which says the same on its own website.
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