Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of patients waiting more than six weeks for diagnostic tests in the areas covered by the Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board.

In February 2022 the National Health Service published the “Delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care”. This plan set out a series of commitments to reduce the backlog, including that 95% of patients needing a diagnostic test should receive it within six weeks by March 2025.

To meet this commitment, we are rolling out a network of up to 160 Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) across the country to deliver additional, digitally connected, diagnostic capacity in England. These will deliver up to 17 million tests by March 2025, having added the capacity for nine million more per year once they are all fully operational.

As of July 2023, 114 CDCs are operational, and have delivered over 4.4 million tests, checks, and scans since July 2021. This includes three operational CDCs within the Humber and North Yorkshire which have conducted 63,565 tests since September 2021.