The National Health Service (NHS) Five-Year Forward View delivery plan to tackle early diagnosis and treatment of cancer is still failing cancer patients, according to the U.K. Royal College of Radiologists (RCR).
The RCR applauds the ambition of the updated plans but remains "saddened by the lack of detail about delivery," RCR President Dr. Nicola Strickland noted in a statement.
"While the plans appear to address the need to speed up and expand diagnostic capacity and promise continued investment in radiotherapy services, they will still fail to enable the outcomes envisaged by the English Cancer Strategy as the workforce needed to deliver them has not been funded," she said.
Rapid diagnostic and assessment centers are admirable, but they are unlikely to lead to patients getting their test results any sooner, the RCR stated. Almost a quarter of a million patients are already waiting more than a month for the results of scans in the U.K. due to a severe shortage of radiologists, it added.
The NHS advocated 35 additional 35 training places for clinical radiologists, but there are more than 460 consultant radiologist vacancies.
"The absence of detail on the implementation of these plans is disappointing," Strickland concluded. "Patients and doctors were hoping to see a meaningful and serious commitment to meeting the ambitions of the Cancer Strategy. These plans fail to deliver this."
