Keir Starmer praises Metrocentre NHS testing site in drive to cut hospital waiting lists

Prime Minister Keir Starmer giving his speech on reducing NHS wait times on January 6, 2025
-Credit:Getty Images


A multi-million pound NHS site at the Metrocentre is an exemplar of how Labour plans to cut hospital waiting times, the Prime Minister has said.

Sir Keir Starmer has hailed the Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC), which opened in the Gateshead shopping centre's old House of Fraser store last October, as “a model of the future”. The site has provided an alternative location for MRI and CT scans, heart tests, and other facilities, with the intention of making appointments more convenient for patients and reducing the burden on under-pressure hospitals.

Labour has pledged to expand the work of such sites, 170 of which are due to open by the end of March, as part of its promise to end hospital backlogs across the country. There were 246,503 patients on waiting lists across the five acute NHS trusts in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and County Durham as of November last year, according to most recent NHS figures, and 7.5 million nationwide.

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Under reforms set out earlier this month, the Government has said it wants 92% of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment by March 2029 – a target that none of our trusts are meeting today, with current rates ranging from 68.4% in Newcastle to 80.3% at the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) on Monday, Sir Keir said that CDCs being open 12 hours a day and seven days a week, as the £18.6 million Metrocentre site is, was key to efforts to “get to grips” with the NHS backlog.

He added: “That is what we want – obviously we want it for Newcastle for the North East, but that is the sort of thing we would want to point to for other areas. And I think putting it in a shopping centre.. .this is about trying to say that you don’t have to take an afternoon off work to get a test or a scan, we can bring it to you or your shopping centre.

“So in both those respects, the length of time it is open for and just the convenience, is a model of what we want to do that we have got in the North East.”

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The Government says it also wants to launch 17 new and expanded surgical hubs by June 2025, similar to the purpose-built day treatment centre which opened at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital in 2022, and upgrade the NHS app to make it easier to manage appointments and receive results.

The NHS Community Diagnostic Centre at Gateshead's Metrocentre
The NHS Community Diagnostic Centre at Gateshead's Metrocentre -Credit:Newcastle Chronicle

After a report last year warned that much of the North East’s healthcare infrastructure is in need of serious upgrades, Sir Keir told the LDRS today that the pressure caused by waiting lists was “inhibiting the work that needs to be done on infrastructure because the hospitals are just over-burdened too much of the time”. A document sent to NHS chiefs by the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) last summer said that 14% of healthcare buildings in the region, and an astonishing 51% in Gateshead, are pre-war.

Asked if his administration would deliver the investment required to modernise the North East’s hospitals, with plans including the building of a new wing at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, the Prime Minister said: “We need to make sure we have got the infrastructure in the right place and we have got a couple of investment programmes in terms of what we are going to do. There will be some announcements about where that impacts.

“But one of the things we want to do as well as making sure we have the right facilities in our hospitals, is to get people out of the hospitals which is what this is about. Making sure that you don’t necessarily have to go to the hospital for your scan and your test, making sure you are being dealt with in the community. The burden on hospitals is too great and once we can get that balance right it gives us a bit more space when it comes to the infrastructure itself.”