NHS gave private firms record £216m to examine X-rays in 2024

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

The amount of money NHS organisations across the UK are paying companies to interpret scans has doubled in five years as demand rises for diagnostic tests.

Despite the growth in privatisation, the NHS in England failed to read 976,000 X-rays and CT and MRI scan results within its one-month target – the highest number 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” which it blamed on the NHS’s failure to recruit enough specialists to read all the scans patients have in its hospitals.

The college said the growing outsourcing of scan analysis risked creating “a vicious cycle” in which NHS radiology services were increasingly weakened and its doctors drawn to private work.

Dr Katharine Halliday, the RCR’s president, said: “The current sticking plaster approach to managing excess demand in radiology is unsustainable and certainly isn’t working for patients, who face agonising waits for answers about their health.

“It is a false economy to be spending over £200m of NHS funds outsourcing radiology work to private companies, and evidence of our failure to train and retain the amount of NHS radiologists we need.”

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Source: The Guardian, 15 May 2025