An evaluation of Community Diagnostic Centres

In October 2021, the Government launched the set-up of Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) offering diagnostic tests closer to people’s homes, backed by a £2.3 billion investment. Early diagnosis can have a significant impact on patient outcomes (and possibly, healthcare costs), particularly in the context of cancer.

As of March 2025, 169 CDCs have been established in England. They are intended to make it easier to access tests, decrease waiting lists, reduce hospital visits, and ease pressures on the NHS. An extension of CDC opening hours is a core component of the plan recently announced by the UK Prime Minister for tackling the NHS waiting list backlog. However, some recent evidence suggests that CDCs may not be achieving all of these aims and there is a need to understand the difference CDCs make for patients and the wider health system around access to diagnostic services.

The overall aim of this study is to understand how CDCs sit within local health services and diagnostic pathways. Specifically, we want to:

1. understand how CDCs operate alongside existing diagnostic services such as rapid diagnostic centre pathways or urgent GP direct access to diagnostic services⁹ and how they work to reduce waiting lists and pressures on the NHS;
2. examine how CDCs fit into the wider commissioning landscape at the Integrated Care Board level;
3. understand the experiences of staff, including access to training and support, and perceptions of how CDC address inequalities in access to diagnostic services; and
4. Understand the experiences of services users of CDCs, specifically in relation to continuity of care and coordination between services.

We plan to take an in-depth look (using a case-study approach) at 7-10 of these CDCs. We will select them in a way that includes wide variation in geographic location and characteristics of the centres. 

At each site, we will take a look at what is happening at these locations. This will involve speaking to staff responsible for delivering the service and the service users themselves. We also seek to speak with professionals who are indirectly linked to CDCs, including GPs and acute care diagnostic service managers, to help understand how the CDC fits within the local health system.