New £8.32m Corby Community Diagnostic Centre to provide MRI, CT and ultrasound scans for thousands of North Northants patients

Thousands of local people who need diagnostic tests like MRI, CT and ultrasound scans, are set to benefit from two new Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) planned for Northamptonshire.

Funded by NHS England, the CDCs – Corby’s serving the north of the county, the other in Northampton – will help tackle waiting lists for diagnostic tests and speed-up care for patients.

The Northamptonshire sites are set to receive £16.64m over three years, the cash split evenly between the two areas after a successful capital funding bid.

Scheduled to be completed by summer 2024, before the CDCs open, tests will be carried out in mobile units in Corby, Kettering and Irthlingborough (run by healthcare firm Alliance Medical).

Director of strategy for the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group, Polly Grimmett, said: “We are delighted that the bids to establish two CDCs in Northamptonshire have been successful and this will be very good news for patients who need diagnostic tests. The new facilities will be additional to the diagnostic testing currently done within Kettering and Northampton general hospitals and in some of our other community sites.”

The NHS standard for diagnostic waiting times is six weeks but now waiting times for routine non-urgent specialist tests such as MRI and CT in Northamptonshire can be up to 20 weeks for MRI and 13 weeks for CT, with shorter waits for other tests.

Waiting lists have been growing with Ms Grimmett citing several reasons – population growth, Covid backlogs and an increase in use of tests as an alternative to invasive procedures.

She said: “We’re reducing the waiting lists – we were at months and months but it’s coming down. When the CDC in Corby is built, it will be open 12 hours a day, seven days a week for all of the scans.

"For those who work or have caring responsibilities during the day, it’s going to be much easier. At the moment, like most acute hospitals in the country, our two hospitals are working very hard to address waiting times for diagnostic tests.

“Our staff are putting on extra clinics, some of them at weekends, and we are also using extra capacity provided by specialist companies to help us reduce waiting times for routine tests.

“The additional appointments will help support GPs and hospital staff in diagnosing many potentially life-threatening, or debilitating conditions, at an earlier point. In turn this will help us treat conditions and reduce the risk of emergency attendances in hospital.

“It will also help us to reduce the stress and uncertainty patients face while waiting for the more specialised diagnostic tests like CT and MRI to determine what is wrong with them.”

The CDCs in Northamptonshire will be run by the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group – the general hospitals in Kettering and Northampton.

Work will be overseen by NHS Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board – which is responsible for health and social care in Northamptonshire – and has involved other partners, including GPs, local authorities and chief executives from North Northamptonshire Carers and Connected Together.

Corby CDC will be based at the Willowbrook Health Centre site in Cottingham Road and will include CT, MRI, Ultrasound and X-Ray facilities as well as testing using echocardiography, and more appointments for blood tests.

It is also hoped that the new CDC will boost employment opportunities for school leavers with apprenticeships on offer.

Ms Grimmett said: “It’s going to be a massive boost for the people of North Northants. We want to work with the local apprenticeship programmes. We are hoping to work with the local schools – you could start off taking blood tests and eventually become a nurse."

The aim, in line with national NHS targets, is to have 95 per cent of patients waiting no more than six weeks for a diagnostic test by the end of March 2025 with many simple tests performed in much less than that. University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group is aiming to have 85 per cent of patients being seen within six weeks by the end of March 2024.

The Kings Heath CDC will use some of the existing health centre, with facilities extended as needed. It will deliver all the same tests as those at Corby except for x-ray. The hospital trust is investigating how it can further develop other forms of testing in Northampton.

It is expected that the two new CDCs, once fully operational, will be able to deliver at least 90,000 additional tests each year including 16,000 additional MRI scans and 24,000 additional CT scans.

Toby Sanders, chief executive of Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board, said: “We are delighted the county’s bid for CDCs has been supported.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has had a very significant impact on NHS services making it harder for hospitals, and other health services, to keep up with the growing demand for tests.

“In addition, Northamptonshire is one of the fastest growing counties in England so – even without the Covid-19 pandemic – investing in diagnostic test capacity would have been a key priority for us.

“These new centres will be an exciting new way of providing diagnostic tests to our local community closer to their homes. They will speed-up people’s access to tests and play a very important part in the treatment of many medical and surgical conditions.”